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Ancient Classics for English Readers. 



EDITED BY THE 



Rev. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. 



{SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES.) 



LI VY 



CONTENTS OF THE SERIES. 



HOMER : THE ILIAD By the Editor. 

HOMER: THE ODYSSEY, . . By the Same. 

HERODOTUS, , . . By George C. Swayne, M.A. 
C/ESAR, .,,... By Anthony Trollope. 

VIRGIL, By the Editor. 

HORACE, By Theodore Martin. 

^ESCHYLUS, By the Right Rev. the Bishop of Colombo. 
XENOPHON, , . By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. 

CICERO By the Editor. 

SOPHOCLES, ... By Clifton W. Collins, M.A. 
PLINY. By a. Church, M.A., and W. J. Brodribb, M.A. 
EURIPIDEa . • . By William Bodham Donne. 

JUVENAL, .... By Edward Walford, M.A. 

ARISTOPHANES, By the Editor. 

HESIOD AND THEOGNIS, By the Rev. James Davies, M.A. 
PLAUTUS AND TERENCE, ... By the Editor. 
TACITUS, .... By William Bodham Donne. 

LUCIAN, .By the Editor. 

PLATO, By Clifton W. Collins. 

THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY, ... By Lord Neaves. 

LIVY By the Editor. 

OVID, By the Rev. A. Church, M.A. 

CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, & PROPERTIUS, By J. Davies, M.A. 
DEMOSTHENES, . . By the Rev. W. J. Brodribb, M.A. 
ARISTOTLE, ... By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. 

THUCYDIDES,* By the Editor. 

LUCRETIUS. , • . . By W. H. Mallock. M.A. 
PINDAR, ... By the Rev. F. D. Morice, M.A 



LI V Y 



Rev. Wr^LUCAS COLLINS, M.A., 

AUTHOR OF 

"etoniana," "the public schools," «tc. 



[ 



LIBRARY 
AEfi_ia_1891 

QEPIOflHElNMQB. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 






ly Tr»W*f 



CONTENTS. 



v^ 



CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY, • • • • • 

tf II. ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS, . . 

ft III. GROWTH OF THE REPUBLIC, 

>' IV. FROM THE DECEMV IRATE TO THE SACK OF 

KOME BY THE GAULS, ^ . , 

11 V. CONQUEST OF L^TIUM, 

ti VI. THE ROMANS BECOME MASTERS OF ITALY, 

It VII. THE LOST DECADE, .... 
II VIII. SECOND PUNIC WAR : THRASYMENUS AND 

CANNiG, 

II IX. SECOND PUNIC WAR : CANN^ TO ZAMA, 

II X. THE ROMANS IN GREECE, 

It XI. THE ROMANS IN ASIA, . , . 

II Xn. THE FALL OF MACEDON, . , 

II XIII. CONCLUDING REMARKS, . . . 



PAGE 

1 

15 
30 

58 

74 

93 

107 

111 
128 
154 
160 
172 
183 



MAP OF HANNIBAL S ROUTE, 



at end of Voluine, 



L I V Y. 



CHAPTEE L 

INTRODUCTORY* 

Titus Livius Patavinus — owing this last name to 
his having been born at Patavium (Padua) — was one 
of that brilliant circle of authors who lighted the 
court of Augustus. His birth may be fixed with most 
probability in 59 B.C., the year in which Julius Caesar 
and Bibulus were consuls. Horace would thus be his 
senior by about [ive years, and Virgil ten ; and al- 
though his name is not mentioned by either poet, he 
was probably well acquainted with both. Though of 
provincial origin, as were nearly all the great Roman 
writers, he came of a family which had in its day 
given consuls to Rome ; and his native city, in which 
his ow^n particular branch of it had settled, was one of 
the most important in Italy. His original profession 
was most probably that of a professor of rhetoric : a 
vocation not only popular and respectable, but often 
highly lucrative, if the professor could get his lectures 
well attended. We know nothing of his first intro- 
A.C.S.S., vol. i. A 



2 Lirr, 

ductiou to the capital ; but, if we may trust his con- 
temporary, Horace, literary ability of any kind was a 
ready passport to the acquaintance of some of the great 
men about Augustus' court, and through them to the 
emperor himself. Some such introduction was at 
least effected ; for he mentions in the early part of his 
history, very simply and as though it were quite an 
ordinary event, his having accompanied Augustus into 
the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and heard him read 
the old inscriptions there.* Some degree of intimacy 
seems also to be implied by the anecdote recorded by 
the historian Tacitus,t that Livy had expressed sucli a 
warm admiration of the character of Pompey, the un- 
successful opponent of the first Caesar, that Augustus 
used good - humouredly to call him a " Pompeyite," 
without allowing the fact of this predilection for his 
uncle's great rival to interfere in any way with their 
friendship. It is said that he even had apartments 
assigned him in the imperial palace. 

It may very probably have been in accordance with 
some suggestion from Augustus himself, or some of the 
able ministers who were in his confidence, that he first 
turned his attention from rhetoric to history. A crowd 
of small authors, eager to meet the tastes of a patron 
Avho was himself an author — though he had the good 
sense to burn his tragedies instead of publishing them 
— were busy writing on the recent civil wars. The 
great emperor — let his undefined position be so termed, 
in default of any other word to express it — was always 
anxious to magnify the historic glories of Eorae. As 
* Book iv. chap. 20. i Tac. Annals, iv. 34. 



INTRODUCTORY. 3 

in that interest he had made Yirgil an epic poet 
almost against his will, so we may conceive he recog- 
nised in the eloquent rhetorician ail the capacities of 
a court historian. There can be n^ doubt, at least, that 
the author of the * Annals of Kome ' had the hearty 
concurrence of Augustus in the great work which he 
undertook. That he must have had free access to 
public documents and records is evident from the ref- 
erences and quotations in the body of his history. 
Without such facilities it could never have been writ- 
ten, and to have obtained them implies much more 
intimate relations with the existing authorities than 
would be necessarily the case in our more liberal days. 
Another proof that he enjoyed some degree of intimacy 
with the family of the Caesars may be found in the 
statement of Suetonius, that it was at his suggestion 
that young Claudius I^ero, the step-son of Augustus 
and future emperor, began the study of history. On 
this slight ground some of his biographers have built 
a theory that the education of the young prince had 
been intrusted to him. 

Such biographies of him as are extant — notably tliat 
by his own townsman, Giacomo Tomasini, bislio]) of 
Citta !N"uova — are utterly untrustworthy in their de- 
tails. All that we know of his private life is that he 
was certainly married, and had at least one son and 
one daughter. The latter became the wife of Magius 
or Magirus, who is said by the elder Seneca to have 
owed his fame as a rhetorician rather to the merits of 
his father-in-law than to his own. So widespread, 
indeed, was the reputation of the great historian even 



4 Livr. 

during his life, that Pliny relates, iu one of his letters, 
the fact of a man having once made a journey all 
the way from Cadiz merely to gratify himself with a 
sight of him. If we want to see how hiographies 
grow, we have only to read the amplification of this 
fact, if fact it be, by such a respectable writer as St 
Jerome : '' We read," says he (and he must mean in 
Pliny),' *' that to drink of the rich stream of eloquence 
which flowed from Livy there came sundry men of 
noble birth from the most distant parts of Spain — froiu 
Cadiz — and from Gaul : and men whom the sight of 
Eome itself had failed to attract, were drawn thither by 
the fame of a single individual. That generation saw a 
wonder, unheard of in any age, and ever to be remem- 
bered, that visitors entered such a city, and yet were 
seeking something beside and beyond it."* Livy re- 
turned to end his days in his native town, where he 
died at the age of seventy-one. 

Some thirteen centuries after his death, the good 
citizens of Padua thought they had discovered his 
bones. First of all, in 1360, a tablet was dug up 
within the monastery of St Justina, bearing an inscrip- 
tion in which certainly occurred the name of T. Livius, 
and which was at once associated with the great his- 
torian. Then, about fifty years afterwards, in digging 
the foundations of some new buildings, the workmen 
came upon an ancient pavement, and below it a leaden 
cist enclosing human bones. The older monks pro- 
nounced this to be the very place where the monumen- 
tal tablet had previously been found ; and, there could 
* S. Hieron. Epist. 53. 



INTRODUCTORY. 5 

be no doubt, these were the bones of Livy. Great 
Lonour was paid to them, and a costly monument 
erected at the public expense. But in one respect the 
citizens were ungrateful : they made a present of the 
bone of the right arm — the arm which had written tlie 
immortal ' Annals ' — to Alphonso " the Magnanimous," 
King of Arragon and the Two Sicilies ; whose succes- 
sors (for he died before it reached him) had it enclosed 
iu a rich shrine. The whole romance, however, which 
had gathered round the great author's bones, was dissi- 
pated by the same relentless modern criticism which 
has since dealt so hardly with the earlier portions of his 
* Annals.' Under competent examination, the abbrevia- 
tions on the monumental tablet — and therefore probably 
tlie bones — were found to belong to a slave who had 
received his freedom, had in consequence taken the 
name of his master, which happened to be " Livius," 
and had subsequently risen to some distinction in the 
city. 

Besides his great historical work, Livy wrote (probably 
at an earlier period) certain Dialogues and treatises on 
philosophy, of which we know nothing beyond their 
mention by Seneca. The * Annals,' which alone have 
reached us, and these in a sadly mutilated shape, con- 
tained in their entirety the history of Rome from its 
foundation down to within a few years of the Christian 
era. Of the hundred and forty-two '' books " to which 
the work extended, we have now but thirty-five, and 
of these some were recovered only in the sixteenth 
century. Pope Qregory I. is said to have ordered all 
the copies of the * Annals ' on which he could lay 



6 Livr. 

hands to be turnt, because of the many superstitious 
stories they contained ; and the same is said to have 
been done by Gregory VII. Considering the character 
of the legends which the Eomaii Church of those days 
adopted for its own, these zealous precautions may seem 
somewhat inconsistent. There is a fanciful kind of di- 
vision of the books into " decades," or sets of ten each, 
— an arrangement due probably to the early editors 
rather than to the author. We have the first, third, 
and fourth of these decades entire, with half of the 
fifth, and a few fragments of the others. Unhappily, 
the lost portion, as containing the later and more au- 
thentic history of the Roman people, and more espe- 
cially of the period with which the writer was contem- 
porary, is that we should have most wished to see. 
Lord Bolingbroke said that he would willingly give up 
all we have for what we have not ; but this is not, after 
all, a very remarkable concession, since tlie missing 
books are more than thrice as many as their survivors. 
Dr Arnold's valuation is more just : he says that we 
might afford to give up *' every line of Livy's history 
that we at present possess, if we could so purchase the 
recovery of the eighth and ninth decades only, which 
contained the history of the Italian War, and the 
Civil War of Marius and Sylla." Gibbon goes so far 
as to say that he would readily sacrifice the works of 
a good many ancient authors which we possess, for 
Livy's history of the sixty years between a.u.c. 663 
and 723. From time to time scholars have been tan- 
talised with hopes of recovering the lost manuscripts, 
and reports of their existence — often in the most un- 



{ 



INTRODUCTORY, 7 

likely quarters. Buried in dust in the library of the 
ignorant and jealous monks of Mount Alhos, whence 
the great Colbert had an idea of sending " two frigates 
under Maltese colours to fetch them " — hidden in the 
seraglio of the Grand Turk — in the island of Chios — 
in St Columba's monastery at lona, — the lost treasure 
was heard of, but never found. At one time a com- 
plete manuscript was " daily expected from the Es- 
curial ; " at another, it was said to have actually 
*^ arrived in Dublin." Once, it is said, "a page of 
the second decade was found by a man of letters in 
the parchment of his battledore, while he was amusing 
himself in the country. He hastened to the maker 
of the battledore, but arrived too late ; the man 
had finislied the last page of Livy — about a week 
before ! " * 

So voluminous a work was not given to the public 
all at once by its author. The Eoman annalist, like so 
many of his modern successors, seems to have pub- 
lished a volume at a time. The first decade was 
written and issued at Rome probably between B.C. 27 
and 20, at the same time that Virgil was writing his 
ZEneid. But the later books, as is clear from the 
last events they record, could not have been finished 
until some twenty years afterwards. Their contents 
are fortunately known to us by means of epitomes, the 
work of some unknown compiler of early date — pos- 
sibly not much later than the original historian — 
which have survived, though the books of which they 
form the summary have perished. There are some 
* Disraeli, Cur. of Lit. 



8 LIVT. 

intervals of Eoman history for whicli these dry skele- 
tons remain as our sole authorities. 

It has been remarked as unfortunate that such 
fragments as we have of Livy's great work form by no 
means the most valuable portion. The first decade 
contains the history of 460 years — from the founda- 
tion of Eome to her subjugation of her warlike neigh- 
bours the Samnites. How far myth supplies the 
place of history throughout the whole of this period is 
a question still under debate by scholars. But the 
old faith which believed iu Eomulus and Eemus as 
undoubtedly as in Antony and Augustus has at least ' 
departed long ago. Critical students have recognised 
the fact that for all this long period we have abso- 
lutely nothing like contemporary authority. Livy made 
full use, as might be expected, and as he distinctly 
asserts, of the works of previous annalists and histo- 
rians. But all these were of comparatively recent 
date. Quint us Fabius Pictor, the earliest Eoman his- 
torian of whom we have any mention, and Cincius 
Alimentus, were both alive during the Second Punic 
War, and these are the most ancient authorities to 
whom Livy refers. There is therefore no trace of con- 
temporary history for the first five centuries of Eome. 
The ' Origines' of Cato the Elder, the History of M. 
Acilius Glabrio, and the ^ Annals * of Calpurnius Piso 
— to all of which Livy makes reference — were still 
more modern compilations. So that in the early his- 
tory of Eome, we have not only to take into account 
the tendency to the marvellous and the mythical which 
ift the characteristic of all chroniclers in the infancy of 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

a national literature, but also the still more embarrass- 
ing fact that Kome seems to have had, for those five 
hundred years, no written history at all, in our modern 
sense of the word. 

There were, however, certain public records from 
which Fabius and Cincius, and other writers, may be 
supposed to have drawn their information. There 
were the '' Annals," as they were called, in which the 
Pontifex Maximus set down the chief events of each 
year. There were the '' Commentaria," or notes of 
events, kept in the sacred colleges of pontiffs and 
augurs, and those of the censors, which appear to 
have been carefully preserved in their respective fami- 
lies. There were, again, certain registers written on 
linen [Uhri Imtei), preserved in the temple of Juno 
Moneta on the Capitol, which gave at least the names 
of the consuls and other pubHc officers for the year, 
and which Livy himself quotes more than once, though 
at second-hand. But such records, even allowing 
them to have been correctly kept as to the succession of 
magistrates and the leading events of each year — laws 
passed, treaties made, and even victories Avon — could 
not, from their very nature, enter into those details 
of person, and circumstance, and motive, which the 
historian requires in order to make his narrative 
readable. The ' Annales Maximi ' of the pontiffs 
which Aulus Gellius had seen were, he assures us, 
very jejune and dry, and far from pleasant reading.* 
There comes in again another difficulty as to the au- 
thenticity of even these dry bones of history them- 
* Aul. Gell. ii. 28, v. 377. 



10 Livr. 

selves, — that both Livy and other writers distinctly 
state that when Eome was burnt by the Gauls, most 
of these public records perished in the conflagration; 
so that Fabius Pictor and his successors would not 
have had even these authorities to work from — autho- 
rities which, however meagre, would be trustworthy 
so far as they went. Probably the Romans would not 
be slow to repair such destruction in the only way 
they could, by substituting new records more or less 
imaginary. As our own monastic bodies in England 
could always produce charters of the earliest date, 
though admitting in their own chronicles that the 
whole contents of their monastery had been burnt by 
the Danes ; so an unbroken list of consuls, dictators, 
and censors was drawn up, from whatever sources, in 
the reign of Augustus or Tiberius, and is still extant, 
in a somewhat mutilated condition, as the * Fasti 
Capitolini/ 

Besides these official records, materials for history 
would be at hand in the copies of treaties made with 
neighbouring states, which were in most cases engraved 
on brazen plates or pillars, and kept for safe custody 
in the temples ; as weJl as in the laws passed from 
time to time, which were engraved and preserved in 
the same way. But of these, again, Livy says that 
many were destroyed in the burning of the city. 
Even in cases where they still existed, there are, un- 
fortunately, many indications that he was too little 
sensible of their value, and too negligent in consulting 
them. Other sources from which the early historian 
of Rome might draw very tempting but not very trust- 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

worthy information, for the biographical part of his 
work, would be the funeral orations pronounced over 
distinguished men, recounting their deeds and those 
of their ancestors, copies of which were religiously pre- 
served in their families, and in the commemorative 
inscriptions on the statues of deceased heroes. But 
the latter, as Livy himself admits,* were often noto- 
riously false. Dr Arnold pronounces them " the most 
unscrupulous in falsehood of any pretended records of 
facts that the world has yet seen." t Indeed, if we bear 
in mind the character of our old-fashioned funeral ser- 
mons and epitaphs, or a more modern French funeral 
" oration," we may judge Iiow far this kind of biogra- 
phical record is likely to contribute to the strict facts 
of history. More to be depended upon, in their spirit 
if not in their details, would be the ancient chants 
and lays, preserved from age to age in the national 
memory, even if not committed in every case to 
writing, and recited or sung at religious festivals and at 
private banquets. That such was the Eoman custom 
may be gathered from many allusions in Roman 
writers; but how early the production of such his- 
torical lays may have been, is quite uncertain. Nie- 
buhr considers that they form a large portion of the 
subs< ructure of such early Eoman history as we have. 
He thinks that he can trace distinct poems on the 
adventures of Romulus, the rule of TuUus Hostilius, 
the combat of the Horatii with the Curiatii, the de- 
struction of Alba, the story of the Tarquins, the battle 
of the Lake Regillus, the exploits of Coriolanus, and 
^ ♦ Book viii. chap. 34, 40. t Hist, of Rome, iii. 373. 



12 Livr. 

other romantic episodes of Eoman history; and he 
even claims to have detected in the pages of Livy 
fragments of the old metrical diction.'^ Such investi- 
gations must always he more or less fanciful: yet 
there can be no reasonable doubt but that the exploits 
of national heroes were worked into song at a very 
early period by the Eomans as well as by other nations ; 
and they must have had some share, and perhaps a 
large share, in the making of national history. Al- 
though this early poetry has wholly perished (as has 
been the fate, no doubt, of much traditional literature 
of this kind in all nations), there are fragments still pre- 
served of metrical annals of a later date. Ennius, who 
lived nearly two centuries before Livy, wrote eighteen 
books of *' Annals " in verse ; and it is not likely that 
his was the first attempt at a metrical chronicle. 
Nothing remains of his work but a few lines pre- 
served here and there in the pages of other writers ; 
but Livy must have seen it, and Xiebuhr thinks 
he was indebted to it for his * History of the 
Kings.' 

It has been urged, on the other hand, that it is all 
but incredible that a people like the Eomans, extend- 
ing as they did so widely, even in those earlier times, 
their rule and their commerce, should for so many 
years have possessed no contemporary and authentic 
history. It is possible, of course, that Fabius and 
Piso may have had access to chronicles which were 

* It is scarcely necessary to remind the English reader that 
Lord Macaulay strongly supports Niebuhr's view, and has 
made it the foundation of his * Lays of Ancient Eome.' 



INTRODUCTORY. 13 

afterwards lost; and as their own works Lave perished, 
we have no means of ascertaining what opportunities 
they enjoyed, or to what authorities they may have 
referred. There may have been an earlier historical 
literature known to them, though not to Livy. But 
it must be confessevl that the whole of his account of 
the Seven Kings of Kome reads rather like a series of 
romantic legends than a record of actual events ; and 
only as such can it reasonably be accepted. We may 
fairly say of this portion of his * Annals ' what he says 
himself of the times before the foundation of Eome — 
that *^ they had more of the embellishments of fable 
than of the simplicity of fact." And it may be strongly 
suspected that what he here asserts of antecedent tra- 
ditions he would have admitted to be true of such 
traditions as he has embodied in his work. It is not 
likely that the age of legend came to a close, and the 
age of history began, at a date exactly coinciding with 
the building of Eome. What amount of fact is em- 
balmed in the pleasant fable — for that some sub- 
stratum of fact there is cannot reasonably be doubted 
— is a question which has furnished, and will pro- 
bably continue to furnish, discussion for more learned 
and ambitious volumes than ours. 

The form into wliich Livy has thrown his work — 
that of Annals, naming the public officers and record- 
ing the events of each succeeding year — was probably 
adopted from his predecessors, but is very incon- 
venient. It interrupts awkwardly the continuous 
story of a campaign or of a great political revolution, 
and is a source to the reader of bewilderment rather 



14 LIVY. 

than of assistance. Especially does it seem unsnited 
to the author's picturesque and somewhat diffuse 
style, which suffers much in its general effect from 
these constant formal interruptions. The annalistic 
method will not be followed in these pages ; and 
only such dates are ii^^^^J^ted as seemed of special 
importance. 



CHAPTEE IL 

ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 
(BOOK T. B.C. 753-509.) 

It has teen already said that these ^ Annals ' begin 
with the foundation of the city of Eome. The authoi 
adopts — he could scarcely do otherwise — the current 
legend of Apneas having led a colony of Trojans into 
Latium, the fated end of his wanderings after his 
escape from Tro}^ The belief in this old heroic de- 
scent, true or false, was too strong in the Roman 
mind for any writer of national history to venture 
upon questioning it, even had historical criticism been 
understood in those times. It was seriously referred 
to, from time to time, in public acts and documents. 
Augustus himself encouraged it as a point of national 
pride ; acute and philosophical historians like Sallust 
— to use Sallust's own words — " accepted " it. It is 
not necessary to examine too closely into the private 
and personal belief of either historian in this national 
pedigree, any more than into his personal faith in the 
national theology. Livy's own expression when he 
introduces the story — " satis constat " — does not neces- 
sarily mean more than "it is universally admitted." 



16 LIVY. 

He took tlie tale as lie found it. He was Ly no means 
prepared, as all our modern historians are, ^vith a 
plausible theory of his own which should sift, or inter- 
pret, or altogether explode, the popular story ; and the 
public for whom he was writing would have been very 
far from appreciating his work if he had propounded 
any theories of the kind. 

The beginning of this history, then, is, in fact, a 
continuation of the ^neid, and scarcely professes to 
be more historical. We have the landing in Italy of 
-^neas and his Trojans ; his marriage with Laviiiia, 
daughter of Latinus the king ; and his foundation of a 
city called Lavinium, after her name. Here, indeed, 
Livy gives his readers the choice between two of the 
current legends : either this marriage was the result of 
an amicable arrangement between the intruder and 
the natives, or the hand of the princess and the parti- 
tion of the kingdom were the prizes of a victorious 
battle fought by ^neas against the king. 'We have 
also, as Yirgil gives us, the attempt of Turnus, the 
young king of the Eutulans, to exact vengeance for the 
loss of Lavinia, who had already been affianced to him, 
his appeal for aid to the powerful Etruscans, and his 
defeat and death in battle. And here the historian 
gives us the fulfilment of those foreboding words which 
the poet has put into the mouth of his hero when he 
is bidding farewell to his young son before he goes to 
this his last victory, — 

" Learn of thy father to be great — 
Of others to be fortunate." * 

, * Virgil, JEn, xii. 435. 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 17 

In that battle on the banks of the Numicius the great 
^^neas died, says our historian, and was buried there ; 
disappeared in some mysterious fashion, said another 
and more popular legend, adapting itself to that pas- 
sionate hero-worship which, as in the case of the 
Britons and Arthur, would not admit any such com- 
mon circumstance as death. 

The widowed Lavinia is said to have ruled the new 
kingdom during the infancy of her son Ascanius ; for, 
in these pages, it is she who is the mother of the young 
chief, and not the unhappy Creusa. All goes on 
happily under her government ; the warlike Etruscans 
have been reduced to quiet, and consent to let the 
Tiber be the boundary between them and the new 
Latin kingdom, whose prosperity is so great that 
Ascanius, when he grows to manhood, leads part of its 
increasing population to found a new settlement under 
the Alban Hills, which he calls Alba Longa (''the 
Long White Town"). There reigned, according to 
the story, a succession of kings called Silvii, from 
Silvius the son of Ascanius, from whom in course of 
time spring Romulus and Eemus, the founders of 
Rome. 

For as the historian did not dream of questioning 
the traditional descent from Troy, still less would he 
have run counter to the national boast that the Romans 
were the sons of the war-god and the nurslings of the 
she- wolf. So we have given us in full detail the legend 
of the Twins, sons of the god Mars by the mortal 
princess, Rhea Silvia, who had been condemned by an 
usurping uncle to perpetual virginity ; the Twins who 

A. c. s. s., vol. i. B 



18 Livr, 

escape the doom pronounced by the usurper when ho 
hears of their bh'th — 

'' The children to the Tiber, 
The mother to the tomb " — 

who are suckled by the wolf and found by the shep- 
herd, who live by robbing the robbers, whom their 
old grandfather I^umitor recognises by their noble 
bearing, and who slay the usurper Amulius, and re- 
store the kingdom to its rightful heir. Did any one 
doubt the story 1 Was there not, as our author points 
out, the fig-tree called Ruminalis *yet standing, under 
which the Twins were suckled 1 And was there not, 
he might have added, the famous statue of the wolf 
and her nurslings, set up under that fig-tree, still to 
be seen 1 ^ Such memorials were far more to the 
Boman taste than any amount of historical criticism. 

So Eomulus and Eemus, continues the legend, pro- 
ceeded to build their new city ; but the brothers 
quarrelled, and the younger fell by the elder's hand. 
And Eomulus went on with his work alone, and 
called it from his own name, Eome. Eut the circuit 
which in his ambition he had enclosed within his new 
w^alls proved too large for his present colony, and he 
opened an " asylum," to which he invited all the reck- 
less and discontented spirits in the neighbouring tribes. 
So the town was at last filled with citizens ; and 
Eomulus chose a senate of a hundred elders, and for 

* Erected out of the fines levied on usurers (Liv. x. 69). It 
is not certain whether the figure of the wolf now^ shown in the 
Palazzo de' Couservatori at Rome is the same or not. 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 19 

his own greater dignity assumed (from the Etruscan.s, 
as our author thinks) the ivory '^ curule chair," and the 
white robe with the purple border, and the twelve 
"lictors" to attend him in state, bearing the rods and 
axes in token of executive p^wer — the welliknown 
emblems which ever after accompanied the sovereignty 
of Eome. 

But the new population, as m3\jht be expected from 
the manner in which it had been got together, was defi- 
cient in the matter of wives ; ap\l this deficiency the 
neighbouring tribes were by no mwxns willing to sup- 
ply. Upon which the Romans had recourse to a strata- 
gem which reads very much like a j^iece of the actual 
history of a rude age. It is an almo%t exact repetition 
of the raid of the men of Benjamin at SliQoh. Eomu- 
lus proclaimed a festival ; and when the daughters of 
the Sabines came to see, at a given si^ijnai they were 
seized and carried off to become the wives of the 
Romans. The outrage is said to have aroused, as it 
well might, the wrath not only of the Sabines, but ot 
other neighbouring tribes, against this lawJess^ young 
community. But when these latter marched theii 
forces against him, Romulus defeated them all in suc- 
cession, slaying and stripping with his own hand the 
chief of the Cseninans (Aero, Plutarch tells us, was his 
name), and solemnly offering the spoils in the temple 
of Jupiter on the Capitol — the first of those spolia 
opima, as they were afterwards called, won by one 
general from the person of another. The Sabines 
proved a more formidable enemy. They had actually 
forced their way into Rome, and a fierce conflict within 



20 LIVY. 

the walls was being waged witli doubtful success, when 
the captured women — already reconciled to their com- 
pulsory bridegrooms — rushed between the lines, and 
entreated their fathers and husbands not to shed each 
other's blood. The result was not only peace, but a 
fusion of the two peoples ; and in compliment to their 
new friends, the Eomans took the additional name of 
Quirites, from the Sabine town of Cures or Quiris ; 
and it was agreed that the nation should form three 
tribes, — the Eamnenses, taking its name from Eomu- 
lus ; the Titienses, from Tatius, king of the Sabines ; 
while for the third, the Luceres, Livy can find no 
derivation. 

The rest of this first Book contains the history, or 
rather the series of legends which passed for history, of 
Rome under its seven kings. Eomulus, after reducing to 
subjection the neighbouring towns of Fidenae and Yeii, 
disappeared in a violent storm, said the popular fable, 
and was seen no inore upon earth. Some would have 
it, says the historian, that he was made away with — 
'' torn limb from limb " — by the senate, with whom 
he was never popular, although the darling of the 
army. He was succeeded by ^ama Pompilius, a 
Sabine from Cures, the law-maker of the new common- 
wealth, as Eomulus had been its conquering hero. 
He was the Alfred of Eoman history, civilising his 
rude subjects, reforming their calendar, and dividing 
the country into cantons. His reign of forty-three 
years was purely peaceful — a now age of gold. To 
him succeeded Tullus Hostilius, who reduced Alba, 
the mother-city of Eome, into subjection to the younger 



ROME UXDER ITS SEVEN KISGS. 21 

but stronger power. To this war belongs the pictur- 
esque legend of the combat between the three brothers 
on each side — the Horatii for the Eomans, and Curiatii 
on the Alban side — with the fatal blow given by the 
one surviving Horatius to his sister, when, instead of 
welcoming him after his victory, she meets him with 
tears of regret for her lover whom he has slain. 

The rasing to the ground of the walls of Alba, when 
its whole population has been transplanted to the 
younger city after the victory, is told in Livy's best 
style, though we must suppose that he is indebted, 
at least for the details, to his own imagination. 

"Then the legions were marched up to rase the city. 
When they entered the gates, there was none of the tumult 
or panic which is wont to be seen in captured towns, where 
the gates have been forced, or the walls breached by batter- 
ing-rams, or the citadel taken by storm ; when the shouts 
of the enemy are loud, and the lnuU of armed troops 
tlirough the city lays everything waste with fire and 
sword. But a gloomy silence, and a sorrow that found 
no voice, so overwhelmed the hearts of all, that for very 
terror they forgot what they meant to carry away and 
what to leave behind ; losing all presence of mind, they 
kept questioning each other, now standing idly in their 
doorways, now wandering helplessly through their houses, 
which they knew they should never see again. But when 
the shouts of the mounted guard, who were ordering 
them to quit, came nearer, and they heard the crash of the 
buildings which were already being pulled down in the 
outer quarters of the town, and saw the dust rising from 
distant points, and filling the whole place as it were with 
an overshadowing cloud — then, snatching up and carrying 
off each what came first to hand, they made their way out, 
leavijig their hearths and household altars, and the roof 



22 Livr. 

under wliicli tliej liad been born and brought np, and filled 
the roads with a continuous stream of emigrants. The sight 
of each other's misery renewed their tears; and piteous 
were the wailings heard, especially from the women, as they 
passed the temples they so venerated, now surrounded with 
guards of soldiers, and left, as it seemed, their very gods 
in captivity. When all the Alb an population had quitted 
the place, the Romans levelled to the ground every build- 
ing, public and private, and gave to utter destruction in 
a single hour the work of four hundred years, the time 
during which Alba had stood. Only the temples of the 
gods were left untouched, for such had been the king's 
command.'' — (i. 29.) 

The fourth king was Ancus Martius — less warlike 
than Eomulus, less peaceful than ]N"uma. Under him 
the Aventine hill was included within the walls, and 
the Janiculum thrown out on the northern bank of 
the Tiber, and successful wars with the neighbouring 
tribes marked the still growing power of Eome. 

And now there comes in, according to the legends 
which the historian followed, a new dynasty of kings, 
and for the first time the annals of Greece and Eome 
are brought for a moment into connection. The story 
of the Tarquins, as Livy tells it, is briefly this : One 
Demaratus, a Corintliian, had emigrated during a 
political revolution and settled at Tarquinii. His son 
Lucumo had married an Etruscan wife of high family 
and imperious spirit ; and she could not bear to see 
her husband looked down upon as a foreigner and an 
alien. She persuaded him to remove to Eome — 
*' amongst a new people energy and merit must make 
their way : " and an omen — an e^igle wliich took off 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 23 

her liusband's cap and replaced it, as tliey entered the 
city gates — confirmed her advice. In the course of 
time King Ancus died ; and tliough he left two sons, 
Lucunio (or Lucius Tarquinius, as the new Eoman 
citizen now called himself), already popular owing to 
his wealth and his gracious manners, was elected king. 
The ncAV reign was prosperous ; the old enemies of 
Itome, the Latins and Sabines, were successfully held in 
check ; the cavahy force of the state was strengthened, 
tLe city walls completed, and those great public sewers 
which are even now the wonder of all beholders 
were begun. But the disappointed sons of Ancus had 
bided their time, and they slew the foreigner. Their 
father's sceptre, however, passed into other hands. A 
boy had been brouglit up in the house of Tarquinius, 
the son of a slave mother, on whose head while sleep- 
ing lambent flames liad been seen to play. Tanaquil's 
divining eyes saw in the prodigy an intimation of his 
future eminence : his abilities as he grew up confirmed 
it, and he had become their son-in-law. To him 
Tanaquil appealed after her husband's assassination ; 
and they concealed his actual death from . the people 
until the son-in-law, Servius TuUius, who at once 
assumed the royal functions, was securely established 
in power, and the sons of Ancus had to take refuge in 
exile. 

To the reign of Servius — the " King of the Com- 
mons " — the historian attributes certain changes in the 
constitution of a more or less popular character. He 
is said to have instituted the *^ census" of property, 
and to have divided the people into *' classes " and 



24 Livr. 

" centuries," in sucli a way as to give the plebeians 
what they had not before, a distinct organisation as a 
component part of the state, and make the burden of 
military service press more equally upon rich and poor. 
He also allotted to the poorer citizens some of the 
land taken from their neighbouring enemies in war. 
In his reign, it was said, the city was extended to 
three new hills — the Quirinal, the Yiminal, and the 
Esquiline — and the whole surrounded by walls which 
continued to bear his name, and to form the bound- 
aries of the city for some eight hundred years, down to 
the time of the Emperor Aurelian. But the new king's 
daughters had married the two sons of his predecessor 
Tarquinius; and the younger Tullia, after murder- 
ing her own husband, had married his elder brother 
Lucius, who had made room for her by the murder of 
his wife. With her full consent, her new husband 
plotted with other young nobles, who hated the Com- 
mons' King, to murder him and take his place. The 
plot was successful ; Servius was flung down tlie steps 
of the senate-house by his son-in-law's hand, and de- 
spatched by his retainers. 

" It was believed that this was done at the instigation of 
Tullia, inasmuch as she did not shrink from the wickedness 
that followed. At least, it is an admitted fact that she 
drove in her chariot to the Forum, unabashed by the 
crowd of men, and summoning her husband from the 
senate-house was the first to hail him " king." When he 
bade her begone from such a scene of tumult, and she was 
making her way home, she ordered her chariot to turn to the 
right down the Orbian Hill, so as to drive out through the 
Esquiline ; when the man who drove her horses suddenly 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 25 

stopped in horror, checked the reins, and pointed out to 
his mistress the body of the murdered Servius lying in the 
road. Whereupon a foul and inhuman deed is said to have 
been done, and the place serves yet as a memorial of it 
(men call it the Accursed Quarter, Vicus Sceleratus), along 
which in her madness, urged by the avenging shades of 
her murdered sister and husband, Tullia is said to have 
driven her chariot over the corpse of her father, and to 
have carried home on the blood-stained vehicle — nay, on 
her ver}^ dress and person — the traces of his slaughter, to 
defile the household gods of herself and her new consort ; 
and that from the wrath of those offended powers, the reign 
which had been so ill begun was speedily brought to a like 
violent termination/' — (i. 48.) 

For it was this Lucius Tarquinius — who thus seized 
the crown, as Livy says, "with no other right than 
force, unauthorised either by senate or comruons" — 
who made the very name of "king" ever after hateful 
to a Koman ear. He was known as Superbus — the 
Insolent. He assumed absolute power; surrounded him- 
self with an armed guard; forbade all new elections 
to the senate ; and, in short, played the tyrant at all 
points. But, tyrant though he was, he maintained the 
power of Eome stoutly and successfully against the 
neighbouring tribes. He reduced the Yolscians by force 
and the town of Gabii by stratagem, and made an 
advantageous treaty with the still powerful confedera- 
tion of the Latins. He is said also to have founded 
the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (a work 
which had been contemplated by the first Tarquinius), 
and in order to gain room for the new buildings, to 
have removed, with their own consent, the temples and 
altars of all the other deities who had been hitherto 



26 Livr. 

establislied there. Two onl}^, wlien consulted by the 
augurs, refused to abandon their ancient seat — Ter- 
minus and Ju vent as ; a refusal which was naturally 
taken as a most happy omen, that the boundaries of 
Eome should never grow narrower, and that her youth 
and vigour should be perpetual. It is plain that under 
the guise of this new foundation and removal we have 
a notice, however vague, of some radical change in the 
national religion, and probably of the introduction, 
under the house of the Tarquinii, of the Etruscan 
divinities and their sacred rites. 

The reign of the second Tarquinius ended, as it 
began, in violence. The outrage committed by his 
son Sextus on Lucretia, wufe of Collatinus, and the 
wdiole tragical story of lier suicide and the revenge 
taken by her husband and father, is an episode of 
lioman history known to most readers. It is told 
briefly enough, but not the less grapliically, in the 
conclusion of Livy's first Book. But it is neither the 
father nor the husband to whom the annalist ascribes 
the leading part in the great revolution which followed. 
It is Lucius Junius, a nepliew of the royal house, 
called ^^ Brutus " from his singular stolidity and apathy 
— assumed, we are told, to make his position all the 
safer under a tyrant's reign — to whom an oracle has, 
according to his own interpretation, foretold succession 
to the chief power at Eome. 

" While they stood wrapped in grief, he dre^v the knife 
from the body of Lucretia, and holding it up before him 
dripping with her blood, said — ' By tliis blood, most chaste 
and undetiled before this outrage of a tyrant, 1 swear — and 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS. 27 

I call you, ye gods, to witness, — that I will follow np with, 
fire and sword, and all such means as in us lie, Lucius Tar- 
quinius Superlms and his accursed wife, with all their seed 
and breed ; and never suffer either them or any other 
hereafter to reign as king at Eome/ Then lie hands the 
knife to CoUatinus, and then to Lucretius and Valerius, 
who marvelled at the strangeness of the thing, whence this 
new spirit had come into the breast of Brutus. As they 
were bidden, so they swore : and at once from that moment, 
when Brutus calls on them to drive out the tyrants, they 
follow him as their leader." — (i. 59.) 

This story of the Tarquins presents all the charac- 
teristics of legend, even without taking into account 
the many practical contradictions involved in it by the 
dates of their respective reigns. Yet it is quite as 
impossible to doubt that under this legend, however 
disguised, we have the record of some very important 
changes in the fortunes of Eome. There is almost 
certainly a change in the dynasty, and probably a 
temporary subjugation of Eome to the Etruscans. The 
massive character of the masonry in the substruc- 
ture of the temple on the Capitoline, and that of the 
Cloaca Maxima, both said to have been built under the 
rule of the Taiquins, and which are evidently of very 
early date, marks it as almost certainly Etruscan. Nor 
is there any reason to doubt that the name of the 
Tarquinii is historical, however much the history of 
their rule at Eome may be overlaid with fable. A 
tomb was discovered in the year 1849 at C^re, in 
Etruria (to which town the banished family are said 
by Livy to have retired after their expulsion from 
Eome), containing thirty-five names, among which both 



28 Livr. 

the Etruscan form, Tarclinas, and the Latin Tarqninius, 
repeatedly occur. ''^ 

This story of the Tanjuins, in whatever condition he 
found it, must have had a great attraction for a writer 
like Livy. The functions of an historical novelist 
Avere exactly to his mind; and we may he sure that he 
has made the most of all the picturesque points in the 
legend. That some of it was originally horrow^ed from 
Greek sources is plain from two instances which we 
happen to he ahle to trace. The stratagem hy which 
young Sextus Tarquinius gets admission into the town 
of Gahii, in order to hetray it to his father — hy repre- 
senting himself as a fugitive from his father's cruelty — 
is evidently founded upon the story which Herodotus 
tells, in its more romantic Eastern shape, of the strange 
devotion shown to King Darius hy one of his generals, 
Zopyrus, who '^ cut off his ears and his nose," and 
presented himself in that condition at the gates of 
Bahylon as a refugee from the cruelty of his master : 
to whom he opens the gates as soon as he has ohtained 
the command of the garrison. t So again, with the 
subtle parable by which Tarquinius Superbus con- 
veys his advice to his son as to his policy at Gabii. 
He dares not trust a verbal reply to the messenger 
whom Sextus has sent to ask counsel : — 

" The king, as in the process of deliberation, walked 
out into the gardens of his palace, followed by his son's 
messenger. There, as he paced along in silence, he is said 
to have knocked off the heads of the tallest poppies with 
his staff. The messenger, tired at last of asking for a re- 

* See Dennis, Cities of Elruria, ii. 44. f Herod, iii. 154, 



ROME UNDER ITS SEVEN KINGS, 29 

ply and waiting in vain, went back to Gabii with his errand, 
as he considered, nnsped, and related what he had said, and 
what the king had done. ' Wliether it was anger, or per- 
sonal dislike, or the innate haughtiness of liis disposition, 
he iiad answered never a word/ " — (i. 54.) 

The son, however, understood his father's meaning at 
once, and acted upon it : he was to take off the heads 
of all such citizens as, from their eminence, might be- 
come dangerous rivals. It is the very same story as 
that which Herodotus tells of the silent hint given by 
Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, to the messenger of 
Periander, except that, in the Greek version, the sym- 
bolic operation takes place in a field of ripe corn.* 

* Herod, y. 92. 



CHAPTEE III. 

GROWTH OF THE REPUBLIC. 

(books II. -III. B.C. 509-449.) 

We are yet on no safe historic ground. The early- 
annals of the Eepiiblic, from whatever sources our 
author derived them — oral tradition, poetical romance, 
or prose chronicle — are manifestly as fall of legends as 
those of the Kings. We have to receive with much 
caution the remarks with which Livy introduces this 
new period — that the birth of Eoman liberty (for such 
he considers it) came at exactly the right moment ; 
that the kings had done their work in the foundation 
and enlargement of the city ; and that for the people 
of Eome in their ruder state such liberty would have 
been premature. Livy is at no time a philosophical 
historian, and his grounds for the conclusion in this 
case are so uncertain, that its value is not great. We 
have still to follow his narrative — with what faith we 
may. 

The house of the Tarquins were banished from the 
Eoman territory ; their property was confiscated ; 
their land, which lay between the city and the Tiber, 
was consecrated to Mars, and became the Campus 



THE FIRST COXSULS, 31 

Martins ; and from that time forth the bitterest accu- 
sation that could be brought against a Roman citizen 
was that he sought to make himself a ^^ king." Lucius 
Junius Brutus and Tarquinius Collatinus were at once 
elected chief magistrates by the assembled people ; and 
the annalist gives them the style and title of *' Con- 
suls" — an office which survived in name at Eome 
even under its emperors, long after its real author- 
ity had ceased.* But so strong was the public feel- 
ing against the whole name and race of the tyrants 
— " who had made of Eoman citizens," men said, 
" labourers and stone-cutters instead of warriors," and 
had slain their good king Servius — that Collatinus 
found his own near relationship to the house fatal to 
his popularity. He soon resigned his office, and with- 
drew into voluntary exile at Lavinium. His successor 
Valerius, a few years later, fell under popular sus- 
picion on similar grounds. He was building a house, 
men said, too grand for a private citizen : he was 
aiming at regal state. He had to pull down his new 
mansion, and even then found some difficulty in clear- 
ing himself in the eyes of the public. 

The banished famil}^, however, was not Avithout its 
friends in the city. Certain of the young patricians, 
we are told, regretted the licence which they had 
enjoyed under a despotic and profligate government ; 
and they conspired to bring the king back. The 
conspiracy was discovered ; and amongst the guilty 
were two sons of the new magistrate, Brutus. A]l 

* But the name is an anticipation ; they were really called 
** Prsetors " — Headmen — then and for many years after. 



32 Livr. 

were led out to execution, the sons receiving their 
sentence from the lips of their father. For some 
reason — possibly that he doubted the story — Livy 
does not dwell upon a scene which offered a grand 
opportunity for his powers of description. He says 
little more than that, when the young men were bound 
to the stake to be "beaten with rods,'' as was the 
cruel Roman custom, previous to execution, " all eyes 
were watching the expression of the father's face, 
whose natural feelings still broke out in the midst of 
this discharge of his public duty." 

Tarquinius now sought aid from his countrymen 
the Etruscans — from Veil, the old enemy of Kome, 
and from Tarquinii. The battle which ensued brought 
no decided success to either side. His son Aruns 
spurred his horse in front of the lines against Brutus, 
with a taunting challenge, which the consul did not 
decline ; and both fell by each other's hand — the first 
slain in the battle. The cause of the exiles was then 
taken up by a chief whose name has become familiar 
to us in Macaulay's spirited lay, " Lars Porsena of 
Clusium." *^ JSlever yet had such a panic seized the 
senate," says the annalist ; " so great was then the 
power of Clusium, so renowned the name of Porsena." 
With levies raised from all the Etruscan towns, over 
which he appears to hvave exercised a sort of suzer- 
ainty, he appeared before Pome, and made him.self 
master of the Janiculum — the suburb outside the 
Tiber — at the first rush. Unless the bridge which 
connected it with the city proper could be at once 
destroyed, Porsena would be across. Then it was 



LARS PORSENA. 33 

that Horatius Codes, with two comrades, volunteered 
to keep the enemy at bay until the bridge could be 
cut down. How he stood there facing the host of 
Etruscans — alone at last, for his two comrades had 
crossed, in. obedience to loud warnings from their 
■friends on the other side, as the last plank was falling 
— how he leapt into the Tiber, all armed as he was, 
and swam safe across amidst a shower of missiles — 
Livy has told well, and Macaulay, to our English ears, 
perhaps even better. 

Porsena turned the siege into a blockade, and pro- 
visions grew scarce in the city. This gives occasion 
again for one of those anecdotes of self-devotion of 
which the Eoman annals are full, and which Livy 
delights to tell. A youth of noble birth, named 
Mucius, obtained leave from the senate to enter the 
. enemy's lines in disguise — " not for plunder," he said, 
" but for a deed of higher mark, with the help of the 
gods." His object was the assassination of Porsena ; 
but, not knowing his person, and afraid to ask, he 
killed his secretary by mistake. 

" He was moving off, making a way for himseli through 
the crowd with his bloody weapon, when the clamour made 
the king's guards run up, who seized, him and dragged him 
back. Set before the king where he sat in state, even in 
that imminent peril he spoke as if the king, and not he, had 
need to tremble. ^ I am a citizen of Eome ; men call me 
Caius ]\Iucius. I sought to slay mine enemy. And I have 
as good heart to suffer death as I had to inflict it : our 
Roman fashion is to do and suffer stoutly. Nor is it I alone 
who bear in my mind this intent toward thee : there fol- 
lows after me a long succession of claimants for tliis glory. 

A.C.S.S., voL L 



34 Livr. 

Wherefore prepare thyself at once for tMs conflict : to "be 
in jeopardy of life from hour to hour — to find an enemy at 
the very threshold of thy chamber. Such is the war we 
Roman youth declare against thee. Thou hast not to dread 
the battle or the open field ; the struggle lor thee will be 
in person against each single antagonist.' When the king, 
alike furious with anger and alarmed at the peril, threat- 
ened him with torture by fire unless he forthwith revealed 
the plot at which he thus darkly hinted — * Lo here/ said 
he, ^ that you may understand how cheap they hold all 
pains of the body, who see a grand renown in prospect ' 
— and he thrust his hand into the fire on the altar just 
kindled for sacrifice. When he held it there to be con- 
sumed, as quite unconscious of any sense of pain, the 
king, wellnigh astounded at the marvel, leapt from his 
seat and bade him be moved away from the altar. '^ — 
(ii. 12.) 

Struck by such heroism, the Etruscan bade him go free ; 
and Mucins — ** by way of thanks," as Livy somewhat 
quaintly puts it — warned him that he was only one of 
three hundred Roman youths who had sworn to at- 
tempt the same deed. He was known afterwards by 
the surname of Scsevola — Mucins " of the Left Hand." 
Cold and dispassionate criticism assures us that such 
tales as these — the heroism of Horatius, the unflinch- 
ing justice of Brutus, the devotion of Scsevola — are 
but the romance of some forgotten poet, worked up 
artistically for efi'ect, and borrowed by the annalist to 
colour his pages. Probably the critics are right. But 
these legends become history at least so far as this — 
they make the greatness of Rome intelligible to us ; 
we understand how a people amongst whom such tra- 
ditions of national character were current, and pro- 



' 



BATTLE 01 LAKE REGILLUS, 35 

bably believed, should have made themselves masters 
of the world. 

Porsena soon raised the blockade of Eome — startled 
by the revelations of Mucins, as the annalist would 
have us believe ; but he confesses that the Eomans 
had to make terms with him, in which the advantage 
was not wholly on their side. They refused to receive 
back the Tarquins ; but they had to covenant to 
restore to Yeii some of its lands of which they had 
taken possession after its conquest by Eomulus, and 
to give hostages for the fulfilment of this engagement, 
before Porsena would withdraw his troops from the 
fjaniculum.^ 

Eut Eome had not yet heard the last of the Tar- 
quins. The old king had taken refuge at Tusculum, 
with his son-in-law Mamilius. A war which had long 
been brooding with the great Latin confederacy at last 
broke out — ** thirty nations," according to the * Annals,' 
having leagued under Mamilius against Eome. It was 
in this emergency that the Eomans first had recourse 
to the appointment of a Dictator ] in whose hands was 
vested an absolute authority, civil and military, the 
powers of the consuls passing into abeyance for the 
time. Young Lucius Tarquin, at the head of a body 
of cavalry formed of Eoman exiles, fought in the ranks 

* There can be little doubt but that Rome was in fact surren- 
dered to Porsena, and had to cede to the Etruscans all her 
territor}^ on the right hank of the Tiber. Tacitus distinctly 
says so (Hist. iii. c. 72) ; and Piiny mentious tha^-tW-sa^ne 
hard conditions were laid u]K)n the Romans *,as -ujon tic 
Israelites by the Philistines— that they should iiW)TOj i 
except for implements of agri(jUture. ' ' '--■ \u\j\ 

lOEPIOFTHEINTffllOB. 



36 LIVY, 

of the enemy ; and in a great battle at the Lake Eegil- 
lus, the aged king himself rode among them, and was 
wounded. The battle was long and desperate, -^bu- 
tius, " Master of the Horse," ^ singled out Mamilius, 
wdio was conspicuous by his brilliant armour, and 
engaged him in single combat, and wounded him, but 
was himself disabled, and obliged to retire. So doubt- 
ful was the struggle, that Aulus Postliumius (who w^as 
then Dictator) and his staff had to dismount and fight 
on foot, in order to restore the steadiness of the Eoman 
line, and to give orders to cut down every man who 
turned his back. At last Herminius, one of the Dic- 
tator's lieutenants, charged in person upon Mamilius, 
who in spite of his wound had returned into the battle, 
and ran him through with his spear — falling himself 
mortally wounded immediately after, as he was trying 
to strip the body. The Latins gave way, and the 
victory was complete, their Avhole camp and equipage 
falling into the hands of the Eomans. The elder 
Tarquin retired to end his stormy life at Cumae ; and 
Eome heard no more of her " tyrants." The Dictator 
and his Master of the Horse returned to the city to 
enjoy the honours of a well-earned triumph.t A sort 
of negative peace with the Latins followed this defeat ; 

*■ Second only in rank to the Dictator, who was ** Master of 
the People." 

t The reader will miss, in Livy's narrative, the appearance 
of the *' Great Twin Brethren" (Castor and Pollux), who, in 
Maoaulay's ** Lay," are seen by the Dictator charging on white 
horses in front of the Romans, and who appear the same even- 
ing in the city, and tell that the battle has been won. The 
legend is in Dionysius of Ilalicarnassus, vi. 13. 



I 



TREATY WITH THE LATINS, 37 

and a few years afterwards, when the Yolscians were 
forming a combination against Borne, the Latins not 
only refused to join them, but sent the Yolscian dele- 
gates as prisoners to the Eomans. The latter, in their 
gratitude, released 600 Latins who were in their hands 
as prisoners of war. An amount of mutual good feel- 
ing was the result, such as never, says the historian, 
had existed between the Eomans and the Latins before; 
and in tlie year of Eome 261 (b.c. 498), a treaty was 
concluded between the two nations on terms of perfect 
equality. This lands us upon the first safe historical 
ground; for the brazen pillar upon which were recorded 
the terms of the treaty, the names of the thirty Latin 
cities who were parties to it, and of the Eoman con- 
sul Spurius Cassius who concluded it, was still to be 
seen in the time of Cicero. 

But in the internal history of Eome there were now 
taking place events which the annalist, busy with his 
heroic legends, seems only to touch by the way, though 
they are of the greatest political importance. The 
^^plehs" as they were called — the commons, as dis- 
tinguished from the poimlus, the burgher-citizens — 
must have gradually sunk lower and lower in the social 
scale, until their degradation and misery became past 
endurance. Some inkling of the growing discontent 
is given us in the account of the preparations made to 
resist the attack of Porsena. The senate, we are told 
found it necessary to secure the fidelity of the lower 
orders by certain concessions — particularly in the 
matter of the market-price of corn and the monopoly 
of salt. But at the date we have just reached, a new 



38 



Livr. 



war with the Volscians was imminent ; and since the 
burden of it would, as the commons well knew, press 
with most hardship upon them, they took the oppor- 
tunity to put forward their grievances somewhat boldly. 
The chief grievance was this, — their utter poverty com- 
pelled them from time to time to borrow money at high 
interest from the richer citizens, and the law of debtor 
and creditor at Eome was so monstrously harsh, that 
the debtor was liable not only to be sold into perpetual 
bondage, but to be starved to death in prison if his 
creditor chose to withhold the means of support ; or 
even, in case of manifest insolvency, to have his body 
cut in pieces and divided, if there were several claim- 
ants. One sketch that is given us — though probably 
but a fancy picture — sets forth the condition of things, 
as the writer intended it should, far more graphically 
than any political essay : — 

"A man of reverend years rushed out into the Forum 
bearing all the tokens of utter wretchedness. His garments 
were miserably squalid, his person more miserable still ; his 
countenance was pallid, and he seemed to be wasting away 
with hunger. But, through all this disfigurement, he was 
recognised as having once held the rank of a centurion ; 
and the spectators, while they pitied him, recounted other 
military distinctions which he had won. Baring his breast, 
he showed scars which bore witness to many a hard- 
fought field. When he was asked how he came to be in 
this miserable dress and condition, while a crowd gathered 
round him and formed, as it were, a regular audience, he 
said that while serving in the Sabine wars, not only had 
his fields lost their crops in the raids made by the enemy, 
but his homestead had been burnt, his goods and chattels 
plundered, and his cattle driven off j and the war- tax coming 



PRESSURE OF DEBT. , 39 

npon him at this unlucky time, he had contracted debts. 
These had been swelled by exorbitant interest : first he had 
been stripped of the farm which his father and grandfather 
had held before him, then of all his other property ; at last 
the ruin, like a plague, had reached his person. He had 
been thrown by his creditor, not into ordinary bondage, 
but into the hard-labour house and the dungeon. And he 
showed his back, scored with the marks of recent scourg- 
ing."— (ii. 23.) 

The scene and the speech, may be alike imaginary, 
but there is no reason to question its truth as an illus- 
tration. The excitement, long pent up, was terrible. 
The Yolscians were said to be on their march to Eome ; 
and the commons — " so entirely," says the historian, 
" was the state now severed into two " — saw in them 
only deliverers. " The gods were coming to take 
vengeance on their oppressors the patricians." They 
refused to give in their names for enrolment^ in the 
legions. The magistrates were obliged to temporise 
and make promises : the commons at last fell into 
their ranks, marched out with the consul, and " never 
fought better," we are told, as the Yolscians found to 
their cost. 

Eiit the law of debt had been relaxed only to 
be re-enacted more strictly. The indignant com- 
mons held nightly meetings, and again refused to 
enlist. The leading men in the senate were divided 
as to the policy to be pursued. A Dictator was ap- 
pointed, who appeased the malcontents for a time by 
some remedial measures. But the distress and the 
consequent discontent still went on, until in the fif- 
teenth year of the Eepublic it ended in open insurrec- 



40 Livr. 

tion. The national force had been ordered to march 
out against the ^quians — a mere pretext, the commons 
thought, to get them out of the city, and so bring 
them under military law. They mutinied at once, and 
at first clamoured for the blood of the consuls. One 
of the more temperate leaders, Sicinius, induced them 
to take a milder course. Under his orders, they in- 
trenched themselves in a position across the Anio, 
known as the Sacred Hill, three miles from the city, 
and outside the territory of the burghers. There they 
remained some days, and were contemplating an entire 
secession from Eome, and the founding of a city of 
their own. They were aiming, as yet, only at release 
from oppression, not at political power. The patri- 
cians were alarmed, and sent to treat with them, 
choosing, as an envoy likely to be acceptable, one 
Menenius Agrippa, himself of plebeian origin. His 
harangue to the insurgents was couched, says our 
author, in "the rough and primitive style of those 
days " — not in the polished sentences which (in the 
interests of good taste, as he would probably have 
pleaded) he usually puts into the mouths of all his 
speakers, plebeian and patrician alike, in the primitive 
days of -Rome as in the days of its highest civilisa- 
tion. It is possible that, in this exceptional case, 
we have Agrippa's speech nearly as it was spoken. He 
told his hearers, without any kind of preface or exposi- 
tion, the now well-known fable of " The Belly and its 
Members." The moral was obvious — that neither 
section of the body politic could subsist without the 
other ; and the warning is said to have been effectual. 



APPOINTMENT OF TRIBUNES. 41 

The commons consented to return, on condition that 
hereafter their interests should he guarded hy officers 
of their own, chosen hy themselves and from among 
themselves, to whom there should he an appeal from 
any sentence of the consul, who should have free 
liberty of speech in defence of their order, and whose 
persons should he held sacred and inviolable. These 
new officers were called *^ Tribunes of the people." 
There was also conceded, though strangely enough 
Livy does not mention it, a general remission for in- 
solvent debtors, and the release of all who were held 
in bondage. 

Such was the first step of that gradual progress of 
the middle class to political power, which marks from 
this time the internal history of Eome. It was 
grudgingly recognised by the patricians, and attempts 
were soon made on their part to win back the. ground 
that had been lost. A season of scarcity had followed, 
and a large importation of wheat from Sicily had been 
made by great exertions of the public officers. Caius 
Marcius, a successful general who had just 

" Fluttered the Yolscians in Corioli '' — 

and thus received the surname of ^^Coriolanus," proposed 
to sell this corn at a reduction to the poorer citizens, 
on the condition that they would renounce their newly- 
gained privileges. He narrowly escaped the popular 
fury ; and the tribunes, in the exercise of their prero- 
gative, impeached him of treason against the liberties of 
the people. He preferred to trust the generosity of his 
enemies rather than the verdict of his countrymen; and 



42 Livr. 

before the day of trial came, he had taken refuge with 
Attius, chief of the Yolscians. He encouraged that 
tribe to take up arms against Eome afresh ; and under 
his able leadership they soon recovered many of 
their lost towns, and at last pitched their camp with- 
in five miles of Rome. The commons, still dissatis- 
fied, showed once more an unwillingness to fight, 
and the senate in vain sent envoy after envoy to try 
to detach Coriolanus from his unnatural alliance. At 
last, says the legend, his wife and mother went out to 
entreat him : to their prayers he yielded, and drew off 
his legions. His new allies soon quarrelled among 
themselves, and Rome was saved. 

Kext year Spurius Cassius, who had concluded the 
league with the Latins, was for the third time elected 
consul. We are told that he now efi'ected a peace 
with the Hernicans, another powerful and numerous 
Sabine people, who had been always more or less at 
war with Rome ; and that, in accordance wath its 
terms, they gave up to the Romans two-thirds of their 
territory. On this occasion he made a bold attempt 
to apply a remedy to the distress of the poorer 
citizens. He proposed what was then first known as 
an " Agrarian Law ; " — not a redistribution of landed 
property, as the term by abuse is sometimes taken to 
mean, but an allotment in shares to the plebeians of 
such unenclosed lands belonging to the state as were 
at present occupied by the burghers as tenants, paying 
a low rental to the state as landlord. Against the 
opposition of his fellow-consul, he carried his measure ; 
but with a fatal result to himself. Under the consuls 



SPJJRIVS CASSIUS. 43 

of the next year he was impeached. The terms made 
hy him with the Latins and the Hernicans, it was said, 
had placed tliem ahnost on an equality with Eome : Cas- 
sius was making friends of them for his own ambitious 
objects. He had proposed, too, that the money lately 
paid for the corn from Sicily should be returned to 
the poorer citizens ; it was a direct bidding for kingly 
power. The very populace were led away by this 
specious accusation. " So deep-rooted in their hearts 
was their horror of monarchy," says the author, " that 
they spurned the offered gift as indignantly as though 
they were rolling in plenty." The popular reformer, 
too much in advance of his age, was at once condemned 
and executed, and his house rased to the ground. 
" He shared the fate," says Arnold, " of Agis and of 
Marino Falieri." There was a version of the story 
current which sounds strange to our ears, indicating 
the unlimited extent of the patria jjotestas at Eome, 
exercised by a father even over his grown-up children ; 
that this Roman citizen, who had thrice held the 
highest office in the state, was tried, scourged, and 
put to death by his own father sitting in domestic 
judgment, in accordance with his undoubted right. 

Still discontent prevailed among the commons, and 
there was often difficulty in filling up the ranks of the 
legions. In one battle against their old enemies the 
iEquians, it was said that the infantry actually refused 
to fight under Kseso, an unpopular consul of the great 
Fabian house, and even cursed him when he had 
charged and routed the enemy with his cavalry alone. 

It is the Fabii who at this period become the saviours 



44 LI V Y. 

of Eome. We may feel sure that the annalist has 
here supplemented his scanty materials from the family 
chronicles of that house, in which the deeds of their 
ancestors would not be sparingly set forth. It will he 
remembered that Fabius Pictor, who was Livy's great 
authority, was of that line and name. Two of the 
name, in a battle with the men of Yeii, charge alone 
in the front of the wavering legion, which then follows 
them for very shame. Another force is only saved 
from utter disaster by the coming up of Kseso Eabius, 
when the rashness of his colleague has all but lost the 
day. We find seven consulships in succession filled 
by members of the family. At last there comes the 
singular story w^hich most of all, perhaps, made their 
name famous in Roman history. Whether it was that 
Kseso Fabius had made himself and his house unpopular 
with their own order, because he tried to carry into effect 
the agrarian law of Cassius by the division among 
the plebeians of the newly-conquered land, or whether 
the Fabii wished to establish an independent military 
colony, or whatever their real motive was, they quitted 
Eome in a body. Livy's own account scarcely explains 
the migration satisfactorily. The hostility of Yeii, he 
says, was not so much a serious danger as a perpetual 
harass to Eome. Seeing this, Kseso Fabius (now for the 
third time consul) made a proposal in the senate as 
spokesman for his clan. The state had many small and 
troublesome wars on hand, he said : the Fabii would 
take that against Yeii entirely on themselves, at no 
cost to their fellow-citizens either of blood or money. 
It had become almost a family business with them; 



I 



TEE FABIL 45 

and they would undertake to make Rome safe from 
that quarter. So, amid the thanks of all, the consul 
quitted the senate -house, and summoned all of his 
clan to assemble under arms before his own house next 
day. 

" Through all the city the rumour spreads : all extol the 
house of Fabius to the skies. ' A single family had under- 
taken the burden of the state ; the war with Veil was 
turned over to private hands, as a private adventure oi arms. 
Were there but two more houses in the city of the like 
strength, — let one claim the Yolscians, and the other the 
.^Equians, for their portion, — the Eoman people might then 
enjoy peace and quiet, and all the neighbouring tribes be 
brought under their rule.' Next day the Fabii arm them- 
selves, and muster at the place appointed. The consul 
coming forth. with his war-cloak on, sees his whole clan 
drawn up under arms in his outer court. They open their 
ranks to receive him in their centre, and he gives the word 
to march. Never did military force march through the 
city streets so small in immber, so great in renown and in 
the admiration of all beholders. Six hundred and six men- 
at-arms — all of gentle birth, all of one house, under the 
command of no one of whom need the best army of any 
time disdain to serve — went forth, to attempt the crushing 
of the people of Veil by the strength of their single clan. 
They were escorted not only by a body of their own kins- 
men and friends, prognosticating for them nothing short 
of some mighty result — with intense hopes, and as intense 
misgivings ; but also by another crowd, collected by the 
strong public anxiety, and deeply affected with interest and 
admiration. ^ Go forth,' they cried, ^ gallant heroes ! Bless- 
ings go with you ! Bring us back the success your noble 
enterprise deserves, then claim from us consulships and 
triumphs — all the rewards, all the honours we can bestow ! ' 
As they passed the Capitol, and the citadel, and the temples, 



46 Livr. 

the crowd invoked every deity whose ima^ e met their eyes, 
or whose name occurred to their thoughts, * to send forth 
that array with their blessing and favour — to restore them 
soon in safety to their country and their friends/ But the 
prayers were uttered in vain." — (u. 49.) 

They took up a position on the frontier, on the little 
river Cremera, some three miles from Eome, and there 
for two years kept garrison against Veii. Then they 
were surprised, and cut to pieces to a man ; one young 
lad only escaping, to become the new founder of the 
house of Fabius. 

The agrarian laws long continued to provoke con- 
tests betw^een the two orders in the state — the tribunes 
demanding their enforcement, and the consuls resist- 
ing it. In some instances the former appear to have 
failed in their duty, influenced or overawed by the 
powerful patrician houses. In one case, a tribune 
who had made himself too active was found dead in 
his bed — murdered, it was said, by the unscrupulous 
opponents. At last, after many struggles, a law was 
carried which has, been called "the second great 
charter of Roman liberties." * It transferred the 
election of the tribunes from the centuries, in which 
all citizens voted, to the assembly of the tribes, in 
which the plebeians alone had votes. It was known 
as the Publilian Law, from the tribune Volero Pub- 
lilius, who proposed and at last carried it. 

The ^quians from their strongholds in the Apen- 
nines, the Yolscians from the plain and from the Alban 
HiUs, were still pressing from time to time on the 

* Arnold. 



CIVIL DISSENSIONS, i7 

Eoman territory, and finding constant occupation for 
its armies. The account which Livy gives of these 
campaigns is not only broken and confused, but can- 
not be reconciled either with historical probability or 
geographical facts. But it is plain that the close of 
the third century from the foundation of the city was 
a period of more or less disaster for Rome. Losses in 
war were accompanied by severe visitations of pesti- 
lence. Three times it broke out at intervals in the 
space of ten years, carrying off on the last occasion 
both the consuls of the year, two out of the four 
augurs, and an immense number of persons of all 
ranks. As in the case of the great plague at Athens, 
the crowding within the walls of the city of thousands 
of the country people, in order to escape the un- 
checked incursions of the enemy, made the place un- 
healthy, and served rapidly to spread the disease. Dr 
Arnold is certainly right in detecting the fact which 
the Roman annalist implies rather than states — that 
the violent dissensions between the two orders in the 
commonwealth led in many cases, as in that of Corio- 
lanus (possibly also ol the Fabii, as just mentioned), 
to political exile, either forced or voluntary. We are 
told that, in the year of the city 294, the Capitol w^as 
actually surprised by a night attack, and held for some 
days, by a large body of " exiles and slaves " headed 
by a Sabine named Appius Herdonius, who not only 
offered liberty to all slaves w^ho would join him, but 
proclaimed himself generally as having come " to 
assert the cause of the oppressed." The consuls feared 
to arm the commons against them ; the commons, on 



48 Livr. 

their part, declared that it was a false alarm — a mere 
trick of their opponents to divert attention from a 
new law just proposed in the people's interest; and 
it v/as only when a strong force from Tusculum, Avhich 
city had heard of the danger of Eome, marched in to 
the aid of the government, that the national troops 
were persuaded to make an attempt to recover the 
citadel. They succeeded after hard fighting, and not 
until the consul who led them had been killed. 

The war with the ^quians at this time is made mem- 
orable by the story of Cincinnatus. A Roman army 
under one of the consuls was blockaded in its camp ; 
and when the senate met in hurried council, one man's 
name was on the lips of all, as "the sole hope of 
Rome;" it was Lucius Quintius, known as "Cincin- 
natus," from his "crisped" hair. Of his previous 
history the annalist tells us not enough to explain 
what it was which made the eyes of all his country- 
men turn to him in the hour of danger. He and his 
son Kseso had been amongst the bitterest opponents 
of the claims of the plebeians, who had succeeded in 
getting the latter banished on a charge of murder. 
The father is now found ploughing on his little farm 
of some three acres, stripped to his work ; and the 
state messenger bids him clothe himself, that he may 
listen to the senate's commands in decent guise. He 
is saluted on the spot as Dictator — sole and absolute 
governor of Eome and her armies; and is conducted 
to the city, where he is received with shouts of accla- 
mation, — the plebeians, however, still looking on him 
with some forebodings, as a man who had irresponsible 



CINCINNATUS. 49 

autlioritj^, and looked likely to use it to the full. He 
takes the field at once, })lockades the blockading 
enemy, reduces them to surrender, makes them all 
pass under the yokej and lays down his dictatorship, 
after a rule of sixteen days. It is a marvellous story, 
and must be left as the annalist tells it. One point 
in it, even if literally true, may not be nearly so ex- 
traordinary as it seems. That the man who was 
chosen to take the supreme power at Eome should 
have been cultivating a small farm may probably be 
a more accurate picture of Eoman life, in those early 
times, than the grander figures of Roman magistrates 
and commanders which Livy transferred from his own 
days to those of the infant republic. 

The commons had by this time gained an important 
step towards independence by the passing of the 
Icilian Law, by which so much of the Aventine Hill 
as remained unenclosed was lotted out to them in 
freehold : and the burgher-citizens, who had hitherto 
enjoyed the occupation of it under the state, had to 
give up their holdings, — for which, however, they 
were to receive compensation. But a larger and more 
important measure of reform, which had been brought 
forward by the tribunes (whose number had been 
now increased to ten) from year to year, and as often 
postponed owing to the determined opposition of the 
burghers, was now about to be carried. A " bill " — as 
we should term it — had been introduced by Teren- 
tilius, w^hich was in effect to give Eome a new con- 
stitution. It was proposed to choose ten commis- 
sioners — five from the burgher-citizens and five from 

A.C.S.S., voL L D 



50 LIVY. 

the commons — who should draw up a code of con- 
stitutional, civil, and criminal law ; and so set at rest 
for ever all questions in dispute between the two 
parties in the state. At last, after a contest of ten 
years, the bill was carried — but with a very important 
modification ; all ten of the commissioners were to be 
chosen from the burgher class. Another fatal out- 
break of pestilence, which carried off one of the con- 
suls, four of the tribunes, and " threw very many 
noble families into mourning " — to say nothing of its 
ravages in humbler quarters, of which the annalist 
does not take much account — had perhaps softened 
political asperities. But it was a fatal concession on 
the part of the plebeian order, so far as the result was 
concerned. 

Three senators had been sent into Greece, to ex- 
amine the celebrated laws of Solon, and also the 
legislative systems of other states, with a view to the 
drawing up of a Eoman code. The Commission of 
Ten was elected ; and all other public magistracies, 
consuls and tribunes included, seem for the time to 
have been placed in abeyance. The Ten began their 
work, and in a few months presented the result in 
ten tables of statutes, on which they invited public 
criticism and corrections. They were adopted, and 
" remain to this day," says Livy, "the main founda- 
tion of all public and private law." We should have 
been thankful to him had he given us some notion of 
their contents ; but this kind of constitutional history 
was not to his mind, and only some four or five enact- 
ments in the code are known to us from references in 



H 



i-d 



THE DECEMVIRATE. 51 

the works of Cicero. But it was reported — or the 
Ten allowed it to be understood — that two more 
tables were }et needed to complete their work; and 
for this purpose it was proposed to continue the Com- 
mission, subject to a new election of its component 
members, for a second year. To this the plebeians 
willingly assented ; for by this time " they hated the 
name of consul almost as much as that of king." 

The leading spirit both in the old and new Com- 
mission was Appius Claudius. He is probably the 
same man (though the annalist puts him a generation 
lower) who, twenty years before, as consul, had been so 
hated by the army whom he led against the Volscians 
that whole companies threw away their arms and 
refused to fight ; in punishment for which, with the 
support of the Latin and Hernican troops, and the 
stancher burgher-companies, he had inflicted death on 
every officer whose company had fled, and decimated 
the ranks of the defaulters. Kot for this ostensibly — 
for the severity was warranted by Eoman discipline — 
but on other charges, he had been brought to trial 
when his year of office had expired, but had in some 
way escaped. He now took every means to ingratiate 
himself with the commons, in order to secure his re- 
election amongst the Ten. In this he succeeded, as 
well as in procuring that most of his new colleagueb 
should be of the ultra-aristocratic party. 

Then, says Livy, Appius threw off the mask, and 
showed himself what he was, and taught his colleagues 
all the insolence of power. They appeared in public all 
at once with twelve lictors each, whereas in their first 



52 Livr. 

year of office they had been content with one. "A 
hundred and twenty lictors filled the forum ; they 
looked like ten kings" — says the annalist, to mark as 
strongly as possible the effect upon the public. Their 
whole behaviour was one course of insult and oppres- 
sion. They brought out the two additional tables of 
statutes — but it would appear that these contained 
enactments wholly unlike in spirit to those which had 
been issued first.* 

When this second year of office was drawing to 
its close, nothing was heard of any coming election of 
consuls or tribunes, and it appeared that the Decemvirs 
had no thought of resigning their power. They sur- 
rounded themselves with bands of young patricians, 
and treated the commons with more insolence than 
ever. Meanwhile the Eoman territory was being laid 
waste by incursions of the Sabines and the ^quians. 
A meeting of the senate was held, in which some 
plain speaking was used towards the new masters of 
Rome. Valerius demanded permission to speak "on 
the question of the Eepublic;" and when this was 
refused, protested amidst great confusion that he would 
" go to the commons." Horatius Barbatus denounced 
the Decemvirs as the " Ten Tarquins," and reminded 
them that a Yalerius and an Horatius had once already 
taken their part in ridding Eome of tyrants. Valerias 
declared that he was not to be cowed by the terrors of 
" imaginary rods and axes/' — implying that the as- 

* Cicero (De Eep. ii. 37) says that these supplementary tables 
contained laws that were highly invidious ; for instance, de- 
claring marriages between patricians and plebeians illegal. 



STORY OF VIRGINIA. 53 

sumption hj the Ten of these emblems of power was 
illegal. Appius ordered his instant arrest; Yalerius 
rushed to the steps of the senate-house, and loudly 
claimed the protection of the people ; and the quarrel 
was with difficulty appeased by some of the other sena- 
tors, who dreaded nothing so much as a popular revo- 
lution. Generals were nominated for the campaign 
against the ^quians and Sabines; but the troops were 
sullen and disaffected. The result was a defeat in both 
quarters ; and watch and ward had to be kept in the 
city by day and night, in expectation of an attack 
from the victorious enemy. 

The measure of the insolence of the Ten is said to 
have been filled up at last, as in the case of the Tar- 
quins, by an outrage upon a woman's honour. Appius 
had cast his wicked eyes upon the young daughter of a 
centurion named Yirginius, now serving with the army. 
He suborned a creature of his own to claim her as his 
escaped bond-slave ; she was only the supposititious 
child, he affirmed, of Yirginius. Her friends pro- 
tested, and appealed to the law. The case was heard 
— before Appius as magistrate. He made a show of 
justice : the matter should stand over until Yirginius 
returned from service. Then, if he could prove she 
was his legitimate daughter, well : meanwhile she 
must remain in the safe custody of the master who had 
sworn to her as his property. The meaning of this 
was only too plain. Her friends and the whole of 
the crowded court loudly expressed their indignation. 
Her betrothed bridegroom, no less a person than 
Icilius, who when tribune had carried the law for the 



54 Livr. 

allotment of the Aventine to the commons — a man of 
quiet temper, says Livy, but now stung into fary — 
broke through the crowd, and defied Appius on the 
judgment-seat. After a few bitter words, the Decemvir 
thought it prudent so far to give way, as to promise 
to await the arrival of the father on the morrow — 
which he had taken steps, as he hoped, to prevent. 
But Yirginius got the news, and travelling all the 
night, reached Eome next morning. Putting on a 
mourning dress, he Avent down with his daughter to 
the court in the Forum, solemnly w^arning his fellow- 
citizens that his cause was that of the republic. Sur- 
rounded by a strong guard of retainers, Appius did 
not fear to give his iniquitous judgment in brief terms 
— he was satisfied that the girl was a slave : her 
master must take her. The Eoman women crowded 
round to protect her : the father raised his voice in 
loud and bitter protest against this crowning outrage 
on the liberty of Eoman citizens. Appius charged 
him and Icilius with meditating revolution, and bade 
his lictors clear a way through the crowd for the 
master to take away his slave. But nothing can 
give the rest of the story so well as Livy's own 
words. 

"When Appius had thundered forth these words in his 
overflowing passion, the crowd gave way without resistance, 
and the maiden stood deserted by all, a helpless prey to 
injustice. Then Virginius, when he saw no aid was to be 
looked for, said : ^ I pray thee, Appius, first, to make allow- 
ance for a father's feelings, if I have said aught too bitter 



THE STORY OF VIRGINIA. __ 55 

against thee ; then, suffer me to question this nurse, in the 
maiden's presence, as to the facts of this matter ; so, if I 
have been wrongly called her father, I can part from her 
with a lighter heart.' Leave was given : he led the girl 
and her nurse aside, near what are now called the New 
Booths, and there, seizing a knife from a butcher, he cried, 
' Thus, my daughter, in the only way I can, I make thee 
free ! ' Then he stabbed her to the heart ; and lifting his 
eyes to the tribunal, said — ' Thee and thy life, Appius, I 
consecrate to destruction in this blood ! ' Eoused by the 
cries which followed on this deed of horror, Aj)pius bade 
his men seize Virginius. But he cleared a way for him- 
self with the knife as he went ; and so, protected also by 
a body of young men who escorted him, reached the city 
gate. Then Icilius and Numitorius lifted up the lifeless 
corpse, and showed it to the people. They spoke of the 
wickedness of Appius, the beauty of the maiden which had 
been so fatal to her, the hard necessity of the father. The 
matrons followed the body, crying repeatedly, ^ Was it for 
this they bore children 1 Was such the reward of maiden 
chastity?'"— (iii. 48.) 

The men called loudly for the restoration of the 
tribunate, the safeguard of their liberties. In vain 
did Appius order the arrest of Icilius. The indignant 
people found new and powerful leaders in the senators 
Valerius and Horatius ; and Appius had to fly for his 
life from the Forum.* The legions took up the popu- 

* 2^othing can more admirably represent the whole spirit of 
this pathetic episode than Macanlay's lay of ** Virginia." The 
subject was naturally a tempting one to the dramatists ; and 
it has been worthily treated both by Alfieri and Sheridan 
Knowles. 



56 



Livr. 



lar cause, and refused any longer to dhej the Decem- 
virs' orders. Both armies marched to Eome, and seized 
the Aventine Hill, the home of the commons ; and 
each elected ten " Tribunes of the Soldiers " to protect 
their rights. There was some delay in negotiations with 
the jealous patricians ; whereupon the commons left the 
city in a body, and remembering what their forefathers 
had done forty-five years before, established themselves 
once more on the "Sacred Hill." * They demanded not 
only the restoration of the tribunate, and indemnity 
for all the leaders of the revolution — they clamoured 
to have the Ten given up to them, " that they might 
burn them with fire." t They were at last satisfied with 
the permission to impeach them, which was done under 
the new administration. Appius and another of his 
colleagues committed suicide rather than abide their 
trial j the rest were exiled ; and " the shade of Vir- 
ginia, happier in her death than in her life," says the 
annalist who was more than half a poet, " was at 
length appeased." 

It is but a legend, the critics tell us, touching and 
pathetic, but far too artistically proportioned to be 
true. Their judgment may be right ; but history, like 
life, is all the more beautiful for its illusions. The 
story of Virginia may be only the composition of a 



* See p. 40. 

+ Macliiavelli's remark on this is amusing in its cool cyni- 
cism. The people made a mistake, he saj's, on this occasion. 
They were quite right in their demand that the Decemvirs 
should be given up to them ; but they were wrong in explaining 
** pourqiioi." 



Fall of the decemvirs. 57 

professional reciter, its details selected and harmonised 
from a dozen current stories of the tyranny of the 
Decemvirate ; the revolution may have had for deeper 
and wider roots than a father's or a lover's vengeance ; 
but again it is true at least so far as this, — it was men 
like Virginius that made the liberties of Eome. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PROM THE DECEMVIR ATE TO THE SACK OF ROME 
BY THE GAULS. 

(books iii.-v. B.C. 449-390.) 

The revolution ended in the restoration of the old 
magistracies. Ten tribunes were elected, Yirginius, 
Icilius, and J^uinitorius standing first. The choice 
for the consulship fell by acclamation upon the two 
senators who had stood forth as champions of the 
national liberties — Valerius and Horatius. They were 
in fact the first who properly bore the name of 
'^ consul," for the term can only have been applied by 
anticipation to the earlier chief magistrates, whose real 
designation was *^ praetor." The election was not re- 
garded altogether with favour by the aristocratic party, 
since it was considered that both the new consuls, in 
their dealings with the commons, had somewhat be- 
tra^^ed the interests of their own order ; and the senate 
showed its jealous}^ in refusing them the usual honour 
of a triumph, when they soon after defeated the Sa- 
bines and ^quians in the campaign of the year. The 
triumph was held notwithstanding, on the demand of 
the tribunes, which the senate were unable to resist ; 



VALERIAN LAWS. 5^ 

thoiigb one of the speakers was bold enougli to protest 
that it was '* a triumph gained over the senate, not 
over the enemy.'* Eut the defeat of the Sabines at 
least must have been complete, since we hear of no 
movements on their part for a hundred and fifty 
years. 

The military events of this period are of no great 
importance otherwise, though we find the usual border 
hostilities going on from time to time. The political 
changes are of much higher interest ; and of these 
the annalist's account is, as usual, confused and un- 
satisfactory. What may be clearly traced through it 
all is the progress of the commons to political power. 
The consul Valerius succeeded in passing two laws ; 
one to the effect that it should be treason to propose 
the election of any magistrate from whose sentence 
there should not be right of appeal ; and the other to 
place Si plebiscitum — a decree of the commons — on the 
same footing as one passed by the burghers in their 
centuries. It would appear also from other authorities 
— and there are indications of it in these ' Annals ' — 
that it was arranged that in future one consul should 
be chosen from the plebeians, but that as yet this was 
seldom carried out. There now appear also from time 
to time, instead of the two consuls, new magistrates 
called " Tribunes of the Soldiers," uncertain in num- 
ber, who were to be elected from both orders alike. 
Probably it was intended that these should exercise 
the military functions of the consuls, whose civil 
powers were transferred to two other new magistrates 
called Censors, who were to settle the roll of the 



60 Livr. 

senate, to fix the rank of every individual in the stato 
according to his property, and to manage the state 
revenues. This office was reserved for patricians 
alone ; and it gave its holders so much influence, and 
conferred upon them so much of almost regal state, 
that the patrician Mamercus JEmilius won himself a 
great name for patriotism, when he proposed and carried 
the limitation of the appointment to eighteen months 
instead of the original term of five years. Another 
important social step towards the placing the two 
orders of citizens on something like equality was the 
legalising for the future (by the law of Canuleius) 
of marriages contracted between a patrician and a 
plebeian. 

An event occurred a few years afterwards which 
caused great public excitement, and threatened to 
break the comparatively peaceful relations which were 
now existing. During a year of great scarcity, a rich 
plebeian named Spurius Mselius, whose wealth gave 
him a place among the knights — he was a contractor, 
or something of the kind — began either to give away, 
or sell at a very low price to the poorer citizens, a 
quantity of corn which he had got in from Etruria. 
Whether the burghers were jealous of his consequent 
popularity, or whether they really believed it, they 
raised against him the fatal cry that he was seeking to 
make himself a king.* The consuls of the year seem 
to have been either timid or incapable. They sent 

* Arnold keenly observes that ** charity was so little familiar 
to the Greeks and Komans, that the splendid magnificence oi 
Mselius is in itself suspicious." 



FATE OF SPURIUS MMLIUS. 61 

again for the one man whom apparently all Eome 
held to be infallible — Quinctius Cincinnatus, now some 
eighty years old. He was made Dictator, and named 
Servius Ahala, a man apparently of his own mould, 
his " Master of the Horse." Maelius was summoned 
to appear before the Dictator ; he refused to come ; 
and when the officer tried to arrest him, he rushed into 
the midst of the crowd and appealed to them for pro- 
tection. A riot seemed imminent ; and the Master of 
the Horse, who was supported by a strong force (" of 
young patricians," according to Livy), cut him down on 
the spot. The stern old Dictator formally pronounced 
it '* justifiable homicide." The tribunes persisted in 
representing it as nothing more or less than a political 
murder. His house was ordered to be rased to the 
ground as the property of a traitor, and its site was 
known ever after as the *^ Mselian Level ; " but how 
far he was or was not the traitor which the annalist 
makes him out to be, we shall never know. 

The strong town of Fidenae, some five or six miles 
from Eome, had put itself under the protection of 
Veii, and its final subjection (for it had been taken 
and retaken more than once) was the first addition of 
real importance made to the Eoman dominion, which 
from this time forth began its course of rapid extension. 
Veii itself, which had withstood its powerful neighbour 
so long, was soon to fall. Hitherto the wars between 
Eome and her neighbours had been little more than 
border raids, her force a mere field militia, the cam- 
paign lasting, at the most, a few months ; but in 
B.C. 406, Veii, a strong town with walls of the 



62 LIVY. 

solid Etruscan masonry, was regularly blockaded, "by a 
double line of circumvallation, as Livy's words would 
seem to imply, but more probably by something like 
a chain of detached forts, with the view of cutting 
off from it all succour and supplies, — which, how- 
ever, was only partially successful. Then for the 
first time, apparently, a Eoman force was expected 
to keep the field during the winter; and it was not 
without strong remonstrance on the part of the tri- 
bunes that so unpopular a requisition was "submitted 
to. The siege is said to have lasted ten years, like 
the siege of Troy; but the details of it given by the 
annalist can hardly be considered historical. A great 
defeat of the blockading force is recorded in the last 
year of the siege, by the men of Capenae and Falerii, 
who came to help their neighbours ; the report of it 
was exaggerated by panic, and there was terrible con- 
sternation at Rome. Then, we are told, "the leader 
predestined by the Fates to destroy the hostile city and 
to save his country, Marcus Furius Camillus," was 
named Dictator ; and we may suspect at once, with 
Niebuhr and other keen historical inquirers, that we 
are indebted for much that follows to the family 
chronicles of the house of the Furii. Camillus at once 
attacks and defeats the allies of Yeii, takes both their 
camps, restores discipline amongst the Eoman troops, 
draws his lines closer, drives a mine under the walls 
right into the heart of the city, and sends to Eome to 
announce that Veii is ready to fall, and to ask what he 
shall do with the expected spoil. The Eoman popu- 
lace are invited to set out in a body to share it ; a 



FALL OF VEIL 63 

tenth only being reserved by the conqueror as an offer- 
ing to Apollo. And here folIo^ys a circumstantial story 
which Livy himself considers as ^' fabulous : " that the 
mine was ready to be sprung, right under the temple 
of Juno j that the king of Veii was there offering 
sacrifice, when the soothsayer exclaimed that the man 
who presented on the altar the entrails of that victim 
should win the victory. The words were heard by the 
Eomans in the mine ; they broke through, seized the 
victim, and handed the entrails to their general ; and 
so the words came true. 

Veii was taken and given up to plunder, and its 
inhabitants sold for slaves. Great was the joy of the 
Eomans, and no honours were thought too great for 
the conqueror. Never had such a triumph been seen 
at Eome. Camillus had his chariot drawn by four 
white horses ; but there were not wanting curious 
tongues which said such display was neither good 
precedent in a Eoman citizen, nor becoming in a 
mortal man ; it was usurping to himself the privileges 
of Jove and of the Sun. If Camillus did take to him- 
self any unbecoming honour, it is not in harmony 
with the prettier story which Livy gives briefly, and 
Dionysius at more length — that when he recognised 
the greatness of his victory, so far beyond all hope 
and expectation, he lifted his hands to heaven and 
prayed, " that if in the sight of gods or men his own 
and the Eoman people's good fortune seemed too 
great, the compensating evil might fall upon him in 
his own person, and not on his fellow-citizens and his 
country," As he turned round (so ran the story) he 



64 . ZIVY. 

stumbled and fell ; and some men, " judging by the 
event ^* — as such things commonly are judged — inter- 
preted the omen of the downfall of Camillus himself, 
and some of the disaster which was in a few years to 
come upon Eome. 

The campaign against Veil is marked by two dis- 
tinct steps in the internal history of Eome, which the 
annalist passes over somewhat lightly, but which are 
of more importance than many of the petty wars 
which he is careful to record, and probably much 
more authentic than the story of Veii. Then, for the 
first time, was the question of war, "by the perse- 
verance of the tribunes," referred to the people in 
their centuries ; whereas hitherto a decree of the sen- 
ate had been held sufficient. And in this war, for 
the first time, was regular pay given to the troops on 
service. 

Falerii fell soon after, before the same conqueror ; 
who, when he had laid down his dictatorship, was 
chosen one of the Tribunes of the Soldiers. We are 
still perhaps in the domain of fable, when w^e are 
asked to believe the story of the schoolmaster who, 
taking out his pupils — sons of the chief men of Fa- 
lerii — for exercise outside the walls, offered to betray 
them into the hands of the Eoman general, and was 
sent back by him into the town with his hands tied 
behind him, and injunctions to his scholars to flog 
him all the way ; at which act of generosity the men 
of Falerii were so charmed that they voluntarily gave 
up the city to so magnanimous a captain. Whether 
any such episode did or did not take place, it is tol- 



CAMILLUS. 65 

erably certain that Camillus did not address the 
wretclied schoolmaster in the neat and aijpropriate 
rhetorical speech which our author has composed for 
him.* But Falerii fell, and other towns soon after; 
and the Eomans reached the Ciminian Hills — " the 
extreme natural boundary of the basin of the Tiber on 
the side of Etruria." But we must not overrate the 
extent of their early conquests ; as yet no Eoman 
army had marched more than fifty miles from Rome. 

Camillus had meanwhile fallen into disgrace. The 
plunder of Yeii had been distributed before the tithe 
which he had vowed to Apollo had been set apart ; and 
there was a great amount of discontent when this was 
demanded from the holders afterwards. He became 
the object of popular jealousy and dislike. He was 
accused of having secreted for himself part of the 
plunder. There can, however, be little doubt but that 
his strong opposition to the popular party, and espe- 
cially to their project of colonising Yeii, as recorded by 
Livy, was the chief reason for their enmity. The dis- 
contented commons proposed to form at Yeii as it were 
a second Rome ; and in its lands, Avhich they declared 
were more fertile than those round the older city, they 
saw a new state demesne which could be allotted to 
themselves. The conservative senators resisted it as 
almost an impiety to their ancestral gods. The quarrel 
grew so bitter, that Camillus was impeached by one of 

* The reader will appreciate M. Taine's playful criticism : 
** Le pauvre pedagogue a trouve son maitre : il ^coute une le- 
?on de rh^torique, avant d'etre reconduit Ji la ville de la mani- 
^re que chacun salt." 

A.C.S.S., vol. i. B 



66 Livr. 

the tribunes ; and rather than stand a trial in "wliich 
he may have felt that judgment had been passed 
beforehand, he went into voluntary exile; praying, 
says the annalist, as he left the city, that "if he 
were innocent, and wrong was being done him in that 
matter, his ungrateful countrymen might soon be 
made to feel his loss." 

If we are still reading the chronicles of the Furii; 
the historiographer of that illustrious house must 
have had many of the qualifications of an excellent 
dramatist. The Romans were soon to pay the penalty 
of their ingratitude, and Furius Camillus was to take 
an heroic revenge. Tidings came from Clusium that 
a new enemy was threatening not Eome only, but all 
civilised Italy. A voice had been heard in the night, 
near the temple of Vesta, warning the guardians of 
the city that 'Hhe Gauls were at hand" — those 
truculent barbarians, naked to the waist, whose tall 
persons, cold steel-blue eyes, and long yellow hair 
and moustache, so utterly different from the Italian 
type, the Rom_ans to the last could never look upon 
without dread and dislike. The Gauls, who had long 
since driven out the Etruscans from the rich plains of 
the Po, had now crossed the Apennines, and had ap- 
peared in force before Clusium. The Eomans sent 
three commissioners to watch their movements ; but it 
was scarcely the custom of the times or of the Eomans 
— and still less the temper of the house of Fabius, to 
which these officers belonged — to watch a figlit with- 
out taking part in it. Quintus Fabius killed with his 
own hand a Gaulish captain, and was recognised for a 



DISASTER AT THE ALLIA, 67 

Eoinaii wliile he was stripping the body. Indignant 
at this breach of the law of nations, the Gauls sent 
to Rome to demand the surrender of the three Fabii. 
The Eomans refused ; " they knew the demand of 
the barbarians was fair," we are told, *^ but the in- 
fluence of a noble house was too powerful ; '^ and the 
invading horde broke up from Clusium, and marched 
upon Rome, l^o preparations had been made ; and 
while the country people fled before the rapid sweep of 
this new enemy, and filled the city with terror and 
confusion, some hastily-gathered levies marched out to 
check their advance, and met them on the little stream 
called Allia, about eleven miles from Rome. *^ With- 
out sacrifices, without auspices," says the Roman his- 
torian, anxious to account for the unfortunate issue, 
they drew up their line and engaged — only to meet 
what he confesses was a complete and shameful defeat. 
Some were drowned in the Tiber, some fled to Rome, 
and more to Yeii, to avoid crossing the river. We 
are told that in the general confusion the fugitives 
who reached Rome did not even stop to shut the city 
gates, but at once took shelter in the citadel. 

The w^hole story of the sacking of Rome by the 
Gauls is little better than a romance ; yet Livy's 
version of it, founded probably on the family annals of 
the Furii and Manlii, cannot be omitted. Like some 
similar stories in English history, it is likely to retain 
its place in the memory when drier facts are forgotten. 

The Gauls, say these Annals, reached the walls of 
Rome on the evening of the battle. But the open 
gates, and the unnatural quiet, awed them ; they feared 



68 Livr. 

a stratagem, and put off tlieir entrance till the morn- 
ing. They met with no resistance ; all who could 
bear arms had shut themselves in the Capitol, vrith 
their wives and children : the priest of Quirinus (the 
deified Eomulus), and the Vestal Virgins, Avho had 
charge of the Eternal Fire, had buried some of the 
sacred images, and carried the rest for safety to the 
little town of Caere. Such of the lower orders as were 
not trained to arms were bid to shift for themselves, 
and most of them at once dispersed into the country. 
The older senators and patricians announced their 
intention of meeting death where they were — they 
would not burden the defenders of the Capitol, they 
said, with the maintenance of their useless bodies. 
Some say that by a solemn formula they devoted 
tlieir lives for Eome. So, when the Gauls entered 
the Forum by the Colline Gate, and spread themselves 
to plunder, they saw a strange sight. 

"The houses of the lower orders were shut up, but the 
halls of the chief men stood open ; and they hesitated more 
at entering these than at breaking open such as were closed 
against them. Thus it was not without a certain awe and 
reverence that they beheld, sitting in the vestibules of 
their houses, figures which not only in their costume and 
decorations, whose magnificence seemed to their eyes more 
than mortal, but in the majesty of their looks and bearing, 
were like unto gods. While they stood fixedly regarding 
them as though they were statues, a Gaul is said to have 
stroked the beard, worn long as it was in those days, of 
oue of them, Marcus Papirius, who smote him on the head 
with his ivory stafi*, and woke his wrath ; with that began 
a general massacre, and the rest were killed where they 
sat;'— (v. 41.) 



THE GAULS IJS ROME. 69 

The city was sacked and burnt ; but the citadel 
held out. Part of the host stayed to blockade it, 
while the rest spread themselves over the country to 
plunder. One division attacked the town of Ardea. 
There Camillus was " growing grey in exile — inveigh- 
ing against gods and men, and asking where were the 
men who had fought with him at Yeii and Falerii, 
who were always brave at least, if not always success- 
ful 1 " He roused the men of Ardea to a night attack 
upon the barbarians, and cut them to pieces. '* Friends 
and enemies declared alike that there Avas nowhere to 
be found a warrior like Camillus." The Eoman fugi- 
tives collected at Yeii, and took heart, and named the 
hero of the times once more Dictator. 

But before he could reach Eome, says the story, 
weaker counsels had prevailed. The Gauls had dis- 
covered a way to climb the steep of the Capitol ; and, 
but for those wakeful geese who have passed into a 
proverb, and the heroism of Manlilis, who dashed his 
shield in the face of the leader of the escalade, and 
hurled him down upon his ascending comrades, the 
last stronghold of the Eomans would have been taken. 
Still the blockade went on ; but the famine was sore 
among the defenders, and at last they were fain to 
bribe their invaders, who were themselves dying in 
heaps from pestilence, to take a ransom in gold and 
depart. Then the barbarians brought false weights ; 
and when the Roman officer protested, their chief, or 
" Brennus,'' as they called him,* insultingly threw his 

* The name is plainly not an appellative : it is the Celtic 
Bran or Cymric Brcnhin, a chief or king. • 



70 LIVY, 

sword into tlie scale, and gave no explanation beyond 
the words, " Woe to the conquered ! " But, said the 
legends in conclusion, before the disgraceful bargain 
had been concluded, the great Dictator marched in 
from Veii, bade the gold be taken back, and told his 
countrymen to remember that Eome must be ransomed 
not with gold but steel. He drove the Gauls out of 
the city, defeated them in two great battles, destroyed 
their camp, and " not a man was left to carry home 
the news of their disaster. 

Such is the story told by Livy j evidently so 
coloured and exaggerated, to enhance the glory of 
Camillas and to save the w^ounded honour of Eome, 
that all attempts to rectify the history, and sift the 
truth out of the fiction, are more ingenious than satis- 
factory. Through it all there stands out the great fact 
that Eome was taken and burnt, and the Capitol held 
to ransom ; and there is every reason to suppose that 
the Gauls got clear off with most of their plunder. 
How great must have been the devastation made by 
such an inroad we might readily imagine, even if we 
did not collect sufficient intimation of it from the pages 
of Livy. He tells us how the buildings in the city 
were so utterly ruined, that the mass of the peo23le 
would have deserted them for ever, had not every 
patriotic argument and every religious sentiment been 
appealed to. Once more — and this time perhaps 
with better reason — the cry was raised for a general 
migration to Veii ; and Camillus, still the controlling 
spirit in all emergencies of war and state, had to im- 
plore his fellow-citizens not to desert the gods and 



SPEECH OF CAMTLLUS. 71 

altars of their native city. Eome had prospered, he 
reminded them, only so long as she had been mindful 
of her sacred trast. The words which Livy has put 
into his mouth are surely the expression of the writer's 
own intense love for Eome and Italy. 

** We hold a city founded under auspices and with solemn 
inauguration ; there is no spot within its walls that is not 
full of a divine presence and hallowed associations. The 
days on which our great sacrifices recur are not more strictly 
fixed than the places where they are to be offered. Will 
you desert all these objects oi adoi-ation, public and private, 
my fellow-citizens ? . . . Some will say, perhaps, that 
we can fulfil these sacred duties at Veil, or send our own 
priests from thence to perform them here. Neither can be 
done without breaking our religious obligations. What 
shall I say ol the Eternal Fire of Vesta, and of that Image * 
preserved in the guardianship of her temple as the pledge 
of our empire ? Wliat of your sacred shields, great Mars 
and Father Quirinus 1 Is it your will to forsake and leave 
to desecration all these hallowed symbols, old as the city 
herself, some even older than her foundation ? , . . 
I speak of ceremonies, and of temples — what shall I say of 
those who guard them ? Your Vestals have one only seat, 
whence nothing but the capture of the city ever yet moved 
them. The Priest of Jupiter may not la^\dPully pass a single 
night outside the city walls. Will you make these minis- 
ters of Veil instead of Rome ? 

" If in this whole city no better or more commodious 
dwelhng could be erected than that hut in which our 
Founder lived, — were it not better to live in huts like 
sliepherds and peasants, amidst your own shrines and 
household gods, tlian go into this national exile ? . . . 

* Tlie Palladium — the wooden image of Pallas, asserted to 
have been brought by ^neas from Troy. 



72 Livr. 

Does our afFection for our native place depend on walls 
and beams ? For mine own part, when I was late in exile, 
I confess that as often as my native city came into my 
thoughts, there rose before my eyes all this, — these hills, 
these plains, yon Tiber, and the scene so familiar to my 
sight, and the bright sky under which I was born and 
brought up. O Eoman countrymen ! rather let these 
things move you now, by the love you bear them, to stay 
where you are, than wring your hearts ^^ith regret for 
them hereafter ! Not without cause did gods and men fix 
on this spot to found a city : health-giving hills, a river 
nigh at hand, to bring in food from all inland places, to 
receive supplies by sea ; the sea itself handy for commerce, 
yet not so near as to expose the city to hostile fleets ; a spot 
central to all Italy, adapted beyond all others for the 
growth of a great state." — (v. 54.) 

The appeal was successful, and the citizens began to 
rebuild. We are told (though here we have probably 
some exaggeration) that every public monument was 
destroyed, and every record burnt ; that the very sites 
of the temples were in many cases hard to trace; 
and that the streets were choked with the charred and 
blackened heaps of what had once been houses, so 
that a man could hardly recognise where his own 
dwelling had stood, while ruin and desolation were 
spread for miles beyond the city walls. Even when 
the people had with difficulty been persuaded to 
undertake the task of rebuilding their dwellings, the 
borrowing of money at high interest brought about the 
old difficulty of hopeless debt. The war-tax was 
doubled, which pressed with additional severity on a 
decreasing population. Eome was thrown back almost 



REVOLT OF THE LATINS, 73 

to its condition a century before. And, to cro^^m the 
public embarrassment, the subject-allies who had re- 
mained stanch to Rome ever since the treaty of 
Spurius Cassius, the Latins and Hernicans, took ad- 
vantage of her lowered fortunes to assert again their 
independence. 



CHAPTER V. 

CONQUEST OF LATIUM. 
(books VI. -VIII. B.C. 390-338.) 

Whatever gloss the Eoman annalists may have put 
upon the actual facts of the terrible struggle witli the 
Gauls, the coldest historical judgment must confess 
that Rome is never grander than in her misfortunes. 
The city was rebuilt ; new immigrants — from Veil, 
from Capeno?, from Falerii — were aduiitted to the 
rights of citizenship, to sup])ly tlie gaps made in their 
ranks by the last fatal war ; the numbers must have 
been even augmented by this process, for we. are told 
that four new tribes were added to the twenty-one. 

Camillus fills the stage still. He gains fresh vic- 
tories over the Volscians, and over a new Etruscan 
federation, — for the adversity of Rome was the op- 
portunity for all her hostile neighbours ; even the 
Latins and Hernicans, as has been said, hastened to 
renounce her alliance, not only refusing the usual con- 
tingent of men, but even supplying aid to the enemy. 
The details of the various minor wars, as given by 
Livy, cannot be trusted ; but it is plain from sub- 
sequent events that Rome was able to hold her 



DEFEAT OF THE VOLSCIANS. 75 

own. The Latins and Hernicans, seeing things 
going against them, sent to repudiate the act of their 
citizens who had been 'found fighting in the ranks of 
the Yolscians, and to claim that such of them as had 
been taken prisoners (many were of high rank) should 
be handed over to their own government for punish- 
ment. The senate sternly bid the envoys betake 
themselves at once " out of the sight of the Eoman 
people : " they would not guarantee to rebels, they 
said, the immunity of ambassadors. 

But while Eome thus bravely maintained her honour 
against external enemies, though not without some 
narrowing of her borders for the time, her internal 
condition was one of great suffering for the larger 
class of her citizens, on whom the pressure of debt and 
taxation was weighing more heavily from day to day. 
Again, whether from generous impulse or selfish ambi- 
tion, one of her distinguished citizens put himself for- 
ward as the champion of the oppressed ; and again, 
riglitfully or wrongfully, he was charged with seekin^'^ 
to make himself a king. Manlius, known as " Capi- 
tolinus," from his late heroic defence of the Capitol, 
was jealous — so said his enemies — of the honours cf 
Camillus : was indignant, he said himself, at the suf- 
ferings of the honest commons. One day he saw — 
what was no uncommon sight at Eome — an unfortu- 
nate debtor being hurried off by his creditor to end his 
days in the *' hard-labour-house,'' or possibly by starva- 
tion. In this case the man was an old officer, whose 
services were known. Manlius stopped him, and paid 
the debt on the spot, not without some rhetorical de- 



76 Livr. 

claniation (in -which we hear Livy's voice j and not 
Manlius's) against the oppression of the poor by the 
rich, and his own great deeds/ and his sympathy with 
an old fellow-soldier. He followed up this popular 
act by others even more liberal ; he sold his lands, and 
advanced the money without interest to those who 
were in debt, until it was said that more than four 
hundred owed their liberty to him. Men hailed him 
as the " Father of the Commons." Crowds followed 
his steps in public, and waited at his doors. He ex- 
cited their feelings yet more by openly asserting that 
these patricians, not content with enjoying the use of 
all the public lands, and living on the hard labour of 
their poor debtors, had secreted the gold which had 
been recovered from the Gauls ; " he knew where the 
money was, and would tell them some day." 

Cossus had already been appointed Dictator — partly 
in view of this perilous state of things — and he was 
now hurriedly recalled from the army to Eome. He 
summoned Manlius before him, and called upon him 
for proof of his slanderous charges. The speech which 
the annalist assigns to Manlius by way of defence was 
certainly, if it was spoken, as revolutionary as a speech 
could be. ''He was well aware that the nomination 
of a Dictator was meant as a weapon against himself 
and the commons, not against a foreign enemy. Did 
they ask why he put himself forward alone as the 
champion of the people ? They might as well ask why 
he alone had saved the Capitol. They required him 
to tell them where the gold was that had been takfen 
from the Gauls ; — why ask what they all so very well 



MARCUS MANLIUS. 77 

knew ? He, at all events, would give no information 
of the kind at the bidding of his enemies." He was 
arrested and thrown into prison, appealing loudly to 
all the gods against this ingratitude and injustice. 
Popular as he was, there was no attempt at riot. The 
annalist, in spite of his evident sympathy with the 
patrician party, pays a remarkable tribute to the 
Roman populace : one might almost think he was 
speaking of an English mob. " They had an invincible 
respect," he says, ^'for legitimate authority." No man 
questioned the order of the Dictator. But numbers of 
the people went into mourning, and crowds gathered 
round the gates of the prison where the popular hero 
was confined. The senate tried to appease the public 
excitement by an expedient which they hoped would 
win for them a counter-popularity — a distribution of 
the lands of the town of Satrium, recently recovered ; 
and two thousand settlers were sent out to occupy them : 
but this only drew forth the taunt, that it was meant 
to bribe them into the desertion of their favourite. So 
threatening was the appearance of things that Man- 
lius was released. 

This concession did but encourage the malcontents. 
Manlius held meetings — some at night — in which his 
language is reported as seditious in the highest degree. 
He reminded his partisans of the fate of tliose patriotic 
martyrs, Spurius Cassius and M^elius : he called upon 
them to rid themselves, once for all, of consuls and 
dictators ; it was the commons who ought to rule. He 
was the champion of the commons : if there were any 
higher style and title with which they chose to invest 



78 Livr, 

tlieir leader, let them employ it, if so they could Letter 
gain tlieir ends ! Such an expression was certainly 
plain enough. Manlius was at once impeached. So 
terrible was this charge of ^^makijig himself a king," 
that for that reason, probably, it was remarked how 
he was attended at his trial by no crowd of friends in 
mourning, as was the usual custom ; not even did his 
two brothers take their- places by his side. For the same 
reason, even the commons were now ready to condemn 
him. 

" When the day of trial came, I cannot ascertain from 
any authority what was brought against him by his accusers 
that had to do with his aiming at royal power, beyond the 
crowds he collected round him, his seditious language, 
his largesses, and the false charge he had made. But I 
cannot doubt that the evidence on that point was strong, 
because the hesitation of the people to condemn him lay 
not in the case itself, but in the place of trial. That fact 
seems worthy of remark, that men may understand how 
the greatest and most brilliant public services may become 
not only thankless but even hateful, when joined with that 
accursed lust for power. He is said to have brought for- 
ward nearly four hundred men whom he had supplied 
with money free of interest, whose goods he had saved 
from public sale, and whose persons from imprisonment. 
Added to this, he is said not only to have recited the 
honours he had gained in the field, but to have displayed 
them to public view ; — spoils stripped from slain enemies to 
the number of thirty, as many as forty personal rewards 
from his commanders, among which were conspicuous two 
^ mural' and eight ^ civic ^ crowns."^ More than this, he 

* The ** mural" for being the first to enter the enemy's 
works ; the *' civic " for saving the life of a comrade. 



FATE OF MAXLIUS. 79 

brought forward the fellow-citizens whose lives he had 
saved from the enemy, naming among them, though not 
present, C. Servilius, Master of the Horse. And when 
he had recounted all his services in war, in glowing lan- 
guage corresponding to the brilliancy of his exploits, he 
bared his breast, scarred all over with wounds received in 
battle. Turning his eyes from time to time to the Capitol, 
he called on Jove and the other powers there to aid him at 
his need, and prayed them to inspire the people of Eome 
with the same spirit, in this his day of peril, which they 
had given him to protect that Capitol for the Koman 
people's deliverance ; and implored those who heard liim, 
one and all, to look on the Capitol and its fortress, to be- 
think them of the immortal gods, and so give their judg- 
ment."— (vi. 20.) 

They could not condemn him, says the story, where 
he stood in the Campus Martins, still stretching out 
his hands towards the rock which towered above them ; 
the court broke up, and met next day outside the city 
gates, in a spot whence the Capitol could not be seen, 
and there adjudged him to death. He was thrown 
from the Tarpeian rock, the place he had defended. 
" Such was the end," says the annalist, " of a man who 
had been worthy of all remembrance, had he not been 
born a citizen of a free city " — that is, a city which 
would not hear the name of ^' king." All parties seem 
to have thought him guilty of this treason to the 
commonwealth, at the time : even his own family 
made a vow that none of them henceforth should bear 
the name of Marcus ; but when a pestilence followed 
next year, no wonder that the repentant commons said 
it came as the avenger of Marcus Manlius. 

The pressure of debt and consequent poverty stil) 



80 Livr. 

continued, and it became plain, even to the moderate 
men of the patrician party, that some remedial mea- 
sures were absolutely necessary. According to Livy, 
an exhibition of female jealousy gave the first impulse 
to the struggle which ended in the most substantial 
victory yet won by the commons. Two sisters of the 
great house of the Fabii had married, — one a patrician, 
who was a military tribune ; the other a plebeian, 
Licinius Stolo, rich and distinguished, but still of the 
unprivileged order. The younger Fabia was startled 
by the lictor's appearance at her elder sister's door, 
announcing the return of her husband from the Forum 
—much to the amusement of the minister's lady ; and 
in her mortification she complained to her father of 
her loss of position. The father promised her that her 
own husband should soon enjoy similar public rank; 
and from that time he and his son-in-law, Licinius, 
began to agitate for what were afterwards known as 
the great Licinian Bills. These propositions, when they 
took shape, were three in number. The first provided 
that it should be lawful, from that date, to deduct from 
the capital sum of all standing debts the amount already 
paid in interest. The second made it illegal for any 
citizen to occupy, as tenant of the state, more than 
five hundred jugers (about 280 acres) of the public 
land ; which would leave a large portion to be allotted 
to new claimants, and was practically an agrarian law. 
The third enacted that in future one of the two con- 
suls must be chosen from the plebeian order. The first 
would appear an arbitrary and stringent measure, only 
to be explained by the fact of so many being daily 



THE LlCiyiAN BILLS. 81 

reduced by hopeless debt into a condition of the most 
miserable serfdom, and by remembering that in most 
ancient commonwealths, as "with the Jews, usury 
taken from a fellow-citizen was held discreditable ; 
the second was of course highly unpopular wath the 
privileged class, who looked upon their large and profit- 
able holdings as their own by use and wont ; but the last 
was perhaps the bitterest of all to the patricians, as throw- 
ing down the great barrier between class and class. After 
a struggle which according to Livy lasted ten years, 
during some of which the city was almost in a state 
of anarchy, — a struggle maintained with great energy 
on both sides, yet with considerable patience and for- 
bearance, for though another " secession " on the part 
of the commons was threatened, no blood was shed in 
the contest, — the three " Licinian Rogations " passed 
into law, and a share in the highest magistracy of the 
state was permanently secured for the commons. A 
temple was erected to " Concord," to mark the happy 
termination of the long struggle, and a fourth day was 
added to the Great Games at Rome. . The annalist 
records it subsequently as a curious fact, that Licinius 
Stolo was the first notable victim of his own law, being 
convicted of holding more than the legal quantity of 
public land. 

The border warfare with Yolscians and Latins was 
still going on ; and we find inserted in the Annals, 
though somewhat indistinctly, a second inroad of the 
Gauls, and a complete defeat of them near Alba by 
Camillus, now in his old age for the fifth time named 

A.C.S.S., vol 1. F 



82 LIVF, 

Dictator.* A year afterwards, he died of one of the 
constantly recurring pestilences. ** He had lived five- 
and-twenty years after his return from exile, justly 
styled the second founder, after Eomulus, of the city 
of Eome." 

Two stories are told by our author of this period, 
which, whether true or fictitious, are interesting as illus- 
trations of the old Koman spirit. One of the house of 
the Manlii had been named Dictator for a religious pur- 
pose, and had made use of his power to raise a levy of 
troops to indulge his military vanity. His cruel dis- 
position had shown itself especially in his treatment 
of his son Titus, a slow-witted youth who had a hesi- 
tation in his speech, whom he had banished from his 
home, and treated as a slave. He was brought to 
trial for it by one of the tribunes. The son heard of 
it on the farm where he was working, obtained admit- 
tance to the tribune's house, and suddenly presenting 
himself before the magistrate as he lay in bed, with a 
large knife in his hand, threatened him with instant 
death unless he promised to drop the prosecution 
against his father ; which the tribune, seeing him in 
terrible earnest, did. Livy admits that it was '' not 
a good constitutional precedent, though praiseworthy 
for its filial duty ; " but it was so strongly in accord- 
ance with the Eoman feeling, that, in spite of his in- 
firmity and utter inexperience, he was elected by 

^ * This story is related by other writers also ; hnt Arnold 
considers it to be "merely a fabrication of the memorials of the 
house of the Furii — the last which occurs in the story of 
Camillus, and not the least scrupulous." — Hist, of Rome, ii. 49. 



SELF-DEVOTION OF CURTIUS, _ 83 

popular acclamation to a liigh command in the legions 
next year. 

In that same year is placed the well-known legend, 
so often a subject for poet and painter, of the devotion 
of Marcus Curtius. How a great chasm yawned — 
none knew from what cause — in the middle of the 
Forum ; how the oracles said it could only be closed 
by casting into it **the best thing that Eome pos- 
sessed," most readers know ; but Livy tells the sequel 
in his most picturesque manner. 

"Then young Marcus Curtius, a gallant soldier, chid 
them all for doubting that there could be any better thing in 
Rome than good weapons and a stout heart. He called for^ 
silence ; and looking towards the temples of the immortal 
gods that crowned the Forum, and towards the Capitol, 
he lifted his hands first to heaven, and then stretching 
them downwards, where the gulf yawned before him, in 
supplication to the Powers below, he solemnly devoted 
himself to death. Mounted on his horse, which he had 
clothed in the most splendid trappings that could be found, 
he leapt all armed into the chasm, while crowds of men and 
women showered in after him precious gifts and fruits." — 
(vii. 6.) 

Thirty years after their first appearance, the Gauls 
made a second inroad into Latium (b.c. 361), and a 
third some few years later. They are illustrated by 
two popular stories of personal combat ; the first 
between a gigantic Gaul and young Titus Manlius, 
who had his surname of ^'Torquatus" from the golden 
circlet, the well-known Celtic ornament, which he 
took from the neck of his antagonist ; and the second 
between Valerius and another gigantic champion, who 



84 Livr. 

like Goliath, stalked in front challenging the Eoman 
ranks. Valerius was said to have been assisted by 
a crow which beat its wings about the face of bis 
enemy, and thenceforth to have borne the name of 
"Corvus." Both heroes were soon to be better 
known, and for exploits more important, and pro- 
bably more authentic if less picturesque. With the 
help of the Latins, who had renewed the old alliance 
with Eome, the invading Gauls were beaten, if these 
Annals are to be trusted, in several great battles — ^the 
last under a second Furius Camillus, son of the great 
Dictator. From this time forth we hear of them no 
more in Latium. 

The Etruscans of Tarquinii were at tbe same time 
carrying on with their Eoman neighbours a war which 
is marked by somewhat more than ordinary ferocity. 
They had defeated a Koman consul, and taken numerous 
prisoners ; and in accordance with that horrible super- 
stition which, as we may see hereafter, found its way 
into the religion of Eome, they had sacrificed above 
three hundred Eoman soldiers to their national deities. 
That it was a solemn " act of faith," and not a mere out- 
burst of savage cruelty, is clear from Livy's description 
of a subsequent battle, in which the Etruscan priests 
— who were in fact the Lucumones or chiefs of the 
nation — marched in the front with wild gesticulations, 
^' brandishing live snakes and burning torches in their 
hands." In that war the first plebeian rose to the 
dictatorship — Marcus Eutilus ; and his victories over 
the Etruscans of Tarquinii were rewarded by a triumph, 
in spite of all the jealous efforts of tbe senate to 



FIRST SAMNITE WAR, 85 

resist it. Two years afterwards, a still more signal vic- 
tory is recorded, and a terrible act of reprisal followed. 
Three hundred and fifty-eight of the best-born citizens 
of Tarquinii w^ere saved from the general massacre 
which ensued on the taking of the town, and were sent 
prisoners to Eome ; there to be " scourged with rods 
and then beheaded in the Forum " — in retaliation for 
the deed of the Etruscan priesthood four years before. 
The people of Csere had found the bond of their 
common Etruscan blood too strong not to join Tarquinii 
in levying war against Kome ; but when they humbly 
deprecated punishment, the Romans were magnanimous 
enough to remember only the shelter they had given, 
in the terrible days of the Gauls, to the Yestal Vir- 
gins and the Sacred Eire. In the midst of all these 
difficulties, two more new tribes were added to the 
population of Rome — probably from the conquered or 
submitted Yolscians. 

We are now to enter upon a period which the 
historian is careful to inform us he considers the 
most momentous in the history of Rome. 

" The wars we have to relate from this point onwards 
are greater, whether as regards the strength of the enemy, 
the distance of the scene of action, or the length of the 
war. For in this year hostilities began with the Samnites, 
a people powerful alike in wealth and in arms. This war 
with the Samnites, in which the struggle was long doubt- 
ful, was followed by the attack of Pyrrhus, and Pyrrhus by 
the Carthaginians." — (vii. 29.) 

These Samnites, with Avhom Rome now began a^ 
struggle which was to last, with little intermission, for 



86 , Livr. 

more than fifty years, were of Sabine extraction, occU' 
pying that district of the Apennines now known as 
the Matese, and thence extending their conquests into 
the plains of Campania. Here they came into collision 
with the Eomans. In the course of one of their 
inroads they threatened Capua ; and the men of that 
city, after ineffectual attempts to drive them off, sought 
aid from Eome. With some reluctance, the annalist 
says — for there was an old convention existing' with 
the Samnites — the aid was given, so far that envoys 
were sent to request them not to meddle with the 
friends of Eome. The Samnites treated the message 
with contempt, and the Eoman consuls took the field 
at once. One of them was Valerius " the Crow," the 
darling of the soldiers, not only from his recent ex- 
ploit, but from his genial manners, his hearty good 
comradeship, and his excellence in all athletic games. 
Their victory was complete, 30,000 of the enemy being 
cut to pieces in the first battle, won by the gallantry 
of one of the consul's lieutenants, Decius IMus, and 
their camp taken, and 40,000 shields left on the field 
of battle in a second engagement.^ Capua was garri- 
soned by the Eomans ; but the luxury and idleness 
of a winter spent in that city, we are told, corrupted 
the soldiers. A serious mutiny was the consequence, 
which threatened the safety of Eome, until Valerius 

* ** We have no real history of the Samnite war in this first 
campaign, but accounts of the worthy deeds of two famous 
Eomans, M. Valerius Corvus and P. Decius Mus. They are 
the heroes of the two stories, and there is evidently no other 
bject in eith er of them but to set off their glory." — Arnold. 



POPULAR AGITATIOX. 87 

(appointed Dictator in the emergency) quieted it by 
his wise mediation ; a general amnesty was granted, 
and the troops returned to their duty. 

But the demands which the soldiers are said to have 
made, that no man who had served during one cam- 
paign in a higher rank should in the next be called 
upon to accept a lower — that no man's name should be 
struck off the roll without his own consent — and that 
the disproportionate pay of the cavahy should be re- 
duced — point to other elements of discontent than the 
dissipations of Capua. The movement amongst the 
troops was probably connected with a new agitation 
amongst the commons in their civil capacity ; for 
coincident in time we find two measures proposed 
and apparently carried by one of the tribunes, which 
Livy dismisses in a very few lines, but which must 
have been of great political significance : first, that it 
should be absolutely illegal to lend money at interest ; 
secondly, that no man should be re-elected to the same 
magistracy within ten years (a check ujDon the monopoly 
of public office by the great houses) ; and lastly, that 
as one consul now must be, so in future both consuls 
m((jld be, plebeians. 

The next year saw a change in the relations of Eome 
and her neighbours which is not very easy to compre- 
hend. The Samnites had made a truce with Eome ; 
but the war in Campania still went on, and the towns 
which were hard pressed by the Samnites turned to 
the Latin league for the protection which was refused 
them from Eome. The Eoman annalist assures us that 
the Latins eagerly seized on the opportunity to eugage 



88 LIVY. 

the Campanians in a conspiracy against the supremacy 
of Eome ; but it is more than possible that they were 
indignant at the separate peace which Eome, for her 
own ends, had made with the common enemy. Be 
this as it may, the Latins were summoned to send 
envoys to Rome to explain their intentions. When 
they arrived, they made a proposal as to the terms of 
alliance for the future which was probably not so 
unreasonable in itself as it would appear to a Eoman. 
It was, that on condition of Eome being still acknow- 
ledged as head of the confederacy, one of her two con- 
suls, and half of the senate, should henceforth be chosen 
from the Latins. 

Then Titus Manlius " of the Torque," newly 
elected consul, rose in his place, and loudly declared 
that should the Eoman senate be cowardly enough 
to submit to such dictation from *^ provincials," he 
would slay with his own hand the first Latin who 
dared to take his seat there. Amidst general in- 
dignation, he vehemently invoked the gods of Eome 
against such a profanation. The Latin envoy, quit- 
ting the senate-house in haste, fell headlong down 
the steps and was taken up senseless. Manlius pro- 
nounced it a judgment from the insulted deities, and 
a happy omen for the Eoman cause. War was de- 
clared at once against the Latins ; both consuls set 
out for Capua, and by a curious shifting of relations, 
the Samnites now found themselves, in virtue of the 
late truce, the allies of Eome. 

The foe with whom Eome was now engaged was more 



WAR WITH THE LATINS. 89 

formidable than the Saranites. The struggle against 
the Latins, says the annalist, had many of the features 
of a civil war. Eomans and Latins spoke the same 
language, worshipped the same gods, had married into 
each other's families, and fought side by side against 
the same enemies. "There was nothing," says Livy, 
" in which the Latins differed from the Eomans, ex- 
cept in courage," — but here we must remember it is 
a Eoman who speaks. The struggle was sharp and 
bloody ; but, perhaps for the same reasons, it was 
comparatively short. 

Possibly it was the feeling that they were now in 
face of an enemy to whom Eoman tactics and modes 
of warfare were thoroughly familiar, which led to the 
stern instance of military discipline recorded of the 
consul Manlius. He had given strict orders that there 
was to be no independent personal lighting in front 
of the lines. His own son was in command of a troop 
of light cavalry, employed to reconnoitre. He w^as 
challenged by a captain of Tusculan horse, and, pro- 
voked by his taunts, fought and killed him. It was 
in vain that he pleaded his father's own precedent in 
the case of the Gaul : the consul — as stern a parent as 
he had been a dutiful son — would see nothing in the 
case but a wilful breach of discipline — a double act 
of disobedience to his chief and to his father. The 
only compliment he paid his son w^as to say he knew 
that, like a true Manlius, he would bear his doom 
bravely. He was beheaded in the presence of the 
army, amid the lamentations of his comrades, and 



90 LIVY. 

their bitter execrations on the father ; but the consurs 
orders were obeyed thenceforth."^ 

When the engagement took place — somewhere in 
the neighbourhood of Mount Vesuvius — an act of 
heroism of another character, yet still thoroughly Ro- 
man, gave to the name of its hero a lasting place in 
Eoman memory. The second Eoman consul was 
Decius Mus, one of the heroes of the late Samnite 
war. Both consuls had seen a vision in the night, 
warning them that the gods required as the victims 
" an army on the one side, and a general on the other." 
They at once made a joint resolve that if either of 
the Roman wings gave way, the commander of that 
wing should devote himself to death. When the 
usual sacrifices were offered before the battle, it was 
announced that the omens were fatal for Decius. He 
simply answered that "it was well, if those of his 
colleague were favourable." In the battle, his wing 
began to give ground. He at once summoned the 
Pontifex — the official who must give directions. 

" The Pontifex bade him put on his official civic robe, 
veil his head, and place his hand beneath his toga upon his 
chin ; then, standing on a spear placed under his feet, to 
say these words : ^ Janus, Jupiter, our Father Mars, 
Quirinus, Bellona, ye Lares, ye Nine-Fold deities,t gods 
of our nation, gods in whose hands are we and our enemies, 

* This severity of discipline was a national tradition with 
the Romans. A Posthuniius is said to have done the same thing 
previously in a war with the Volscians. Livj^ does not credit 
the story ; but an allusion in Auhis Gellius siiows that it was 
currently believed. See Book iv. ch. 29. Aul. Gell. i. 13. 

-^ These are uncertain. 



' SELF-DEVOTION OF DECIUS. 91 

\ pray yon, I adore you, I ask and wm yonr pardon, — that 
to the Roman people of the Quirites ye may vonchsafe 
strength and victory, and strike the enemies of the Eoman 
people of the Quirites with terror, panic, and death. And 
as I pronounce these words, so for the republic of the 
Quirites, for the army, legions, and allies of the Roman 
people, I devote the legions and allies of the enemy, 
together w^th mine own body, to the Manes and the 
Earth/ When he had thus prayed, he bade his lictors 
go to Manlius, and straightway tell him he had devoted 
himself for the army. Girding his robe round him, 
he leapt on his horse, fully armed, and charged into 
the centre of the enemy. Both hosts saw in him a more 
than mortal presence, as though he were sent from heaven 
as a vessel charged with the whole wrath of the gods, to 
turn destruction from his own host and hurl it on the 
enemy. So the panic and terror he bore with him first 
shook the enemy's front, then spread through all their 
ranks. Certain it is, that wherever he rode, there men 
trembled as though struck by pestilence.^' — (viii. 9.) 

A stratagem of the other consurs — bringing up his 
veterans only at the last — completed the victory which 
this panic had begun. "We find in some writers," 
says Livy, "that the Samnites, who had waited to see 
what turn the fighting would take, came up to help 
the Romans after the day was won." ^ Scarcely a fourth 
part of the enemy's force, we are told, escaped the 
slaughter ; their camp was taken, and the Latin power 
utterly broken. They succeeded in raising a fresh 

* " There was no Samnite historian to tell, and no Roman 
annaUst would tell truly. Nor need we wonder at this ; for if 
we had only certain English accounts of the battle of Waterloo, 
who would know that the Prussians had any effectual share in 
that day's victory ? " — Arnold. 



92 LIVT. 

army, only to be beaten again by the same consul. 
Many of their towns surrendered at once ; and after a 
few ineffectual struggles, the conquest was complete. 
Within three years of its beginning, the greatest war 
in which Eome had yet been engaged was finished : 
the great Latin confederacy was broken up for ever ; 
terms granted to each separate city were such as to 
isolate them as far as possible, and prevent any such 
union for the future ; and the Eomans and Latins be- 
came practically one commonwealth. 

Manlius was honoured, at the expiration of his 
consulship, with a well-earned triumph. But it had 
its drawbacks. *' Only the older men went forth to 
meet him ; the younger, both then and all his life 
after, abhorred and execrated him." Such is the histo- 
rian's brief but emphatic remark. They remembered 
only the unrelenting sentence which had taken the life 
of his SOIL 



CHAPTEE VI. 

THE ROMANS BECOME MASTERS OF ITALY. 

(BOOKS VIII. -X. B.C. 327-290.) ^ 

EoME and Samnium were both too warlike, and per- 
haps both too ambitious, long to remain peaceful 
neighbours. When the war with the Latins was 
over, and neither required each other's support against 
a common enemy, they watched each other's move- 
ments with jealous eyes. The Samnites took Fregellse 
from the Yolscians, and destroyed it ; the Eomans 
afterwards sent a colony to occupy it, as its position 
was important in maintaining their line of communi- 
cation with Samnium ; though this was, in fact, taking 
possession of a Samnite conquest. The Samnites, on 
the other hand, were accused of exciting to disaffection, 
secretly or openly, some of the smaller states within 
the Eoman dominion. War was inevitable, and both 
were prepared for it. 

The tirst action of any importance resulted in a 
victory gained by the Eomans under somewhat re- 
markable circumstances. Papirius Cursor had been 
named Dictator for the war, and had strictly charged 
his Master of the Horse — a Fabius — not to engage the 



94 Livr. 

enemy in his absence. But Fabius found the tempta- 
tion of command too strong, and fought and defeated 
the Samnites — Livy assures us, with immense loss. 
The Dictator, on his return, sentenced him to death 
for breach of orders. The troops broke out into almost 
open mutiny ; the Dictator was obstinate ; and the 
terrible precedent set by Manlius seemed likely to 
be repeated with highly dangerous results. Fabius 
escaped to Eome : there his aged father appealed on 
his behalf to the tribunes, but even they were loath 
to question a Dictator's sentence ; and it was not until 
the senate and people united to ask the life of the 
culprit as a boon to themselves, that Papirius at last 
gave way. Fabius was chosen one of the consuls next 
year; and after a truce which the Eoman annalist 
accuses the Samnites of having broken, he defeated 
them in a decisive battle, and reduced them to offer 
terms w^hich are represented as humiliating in the 
extreme. They even proposed to give up to the 
Eomans one of their chiefs, whom they declared to 
have been the instigator of what they now confessed to 
have been '^ a treacherous breach of faith." He saved 
himself from Eoman vengeance by suicide. 

But in the next year arose the man who has been 
called the Samnite Hannibal — Pontius of Telesia. 
Under his able leadership took place w^hat Livy calls 
^'the Convention of Caudium, so memorable for the 
blow that fell on Eome." The annalist, never happy 
in his military geography, is content here to make no 
attempt to explain the movements of the campaign. 
We learn little more than that the Eomans were led 



THE CAUDISE FORKS, 95 

by false information into a difficult deiile of the Apen- 
nines, known as the " Caudine Forks," where the 
enemy had already posted themselves in force, and 
fi'om which neither advance nor retreat was possible. "* 
After one or two desperate attempts to break through, 
seeing starvation imminent, they surrendered at dis- 
cretion. The Samnite^ could not resolve hoAv best to 
use their victory. They sent to consult Herennius, 
father of their general, w^ho passed for the wisest man 
amongst his people. The old man's first advice was 
to let their prisoners all go unharmed; and when this 
was rejected as preposterous, he then recommended 
that they should all be put to death. He defended 
this truly Machiavellian alternative by the argument 
that an enemy so powerful could only be safely dealt 
wath either by the most magnanimous kindness, or by 
a blow which would cripple them for many genera- 
tions. Neither counsel was adopted. Their lives 
were offered them on condition of giving up their 
arms, passing under the yoke, and quitting the 
country ; hostages were also to be given for the with- 
drawal of the Eoman military colonies, and for their 
keeping the peace for the future. The troops are said 
to have exclaimed loudly against such humiliating 
terms, and against the consuls for submitting to them. 
Lentulus, one of the lieutenant-generals, reminded 
them, in language which has a certain nobility of its 
ovrn, that their lives were needful to Eome, and that 

* The place cannot be identified with certainty. Xiebuhr 
and Arnold are of opinion that it was the valley betweea 
Arienzo and Archaia^ on the road from Naples to Beueveuto. 



96 LIVY. 

even ignominy must be submitted to in the cause of 
one's country. 

" While the troops were thus chafing at their destiny 
the fatal hour of their disgrace drew on, which was to 
make their experience even more bitter than all their 
anticipations. First they were ordered t-o come outside 
their lines without arms and stripped to a single garment ; 
and the hostages were first given up, and led off in custody. 
Then the lictors were ordered to quit the consuls, whose 
military cloaks were stripped off ; which bred such commi- 
seration among the very men who had just been execrating 
them, and saying they ought to be given up to their fury 
and torn to pieces, that now the soldiers forgot their own 
misery, and turned away their eyes from this outrage to 
their commanders as from a spectacle too painful to look 
upon. The consuls first, stripped almost naked, were forced 
under the yoke ; then each officer in succession, according 
to his rank, was subjected to the like ignomiuy ; then the 
legions, one after the other. The enemy stood round 
under arms, reviling and mocking them. Swords were 
even brandished in their faces ; some were wounded, nay, 
even killed, if their countenance expressed too fierce a 
sense of the indignity, and so offended their conquerors." 
-(ix. 6, 7.) 

They made their way to Capua, where they were re- 
ceived with kindness and commiseration. Thence 
they returned in disorganised parties to Eome, " slink- 
ing into the city late in the evening like delinquents," 
and hiding themselves at home for many days from 
the eyes of their indignant fellow-citizens. Tlie con- 
suls silently abdicated their functions, and a Dictator 
was again named. 

The terms of the convention were shamefully broken 



THE SAMXITE WAR. 97 

by the Eomans ; the annalist himself utterly fails to 
make out a case of anything better than the grossest 
and most unworthy quibbling. The treaty — made, as 
Livy admits, by Roman consuls and tribunes — was 
held not to have been made with the consent of the 
Roman people. Even if the consul Posthumius did, 
as we are told, go back and place himself and his 
brother officers in the hands of the Samnites, as 
guilty of having made terms which could not be kept, 
such individual self-devotion could not heal the public 
breach of faith. The only course which might have 
had any show of fair dealing was, as two of the 
tribunes suggested, to restore in all points the status 
quo at the Caudine Forks before the surrender ; but 
this suggestion did not gain a moment's hearing. 

Tlie Samnite general acted with a noble scorn. He 
refused to accept the victims whom Rome offered 
him instead of justice ; and when the consul Posthu- 
mius, with a mean ingenuity, declaring himself to have 
changed his nationality by this extradition of himself, 
struck the Roman herald, and declared that such an 
act of violence, thus committed by "a Samnite," 
would justify the Romans in at once beginning war, 
Pontius merely expressed his contempt of such a 
subterfuge as " a mockery of conscience unworthy of 
children, still more of elders and consulars of a great 
state," and appealed to the gods of battle against the 
treachery of Rome. 

But the gods were not propitious. Though the 
Samnites renewed the struggle, and maintained it for 
three-and-twenty years, and though the Hernicans 

A.c.s.s., vol. i. G 



98 Livr, 

took the opportuniLy to revolt, and almost all E^rui.^ 
rose in arms against the Romans, the result, in spite 
of occasional reverses, was still in favour of Eome. 
Livy himself admits that the annals of this period are 
hopelessly confused, and it would be out of place liere 
to examine them. One story, which bears the stamp 
of invention on the face of it, asserts that in the very 
first year of the renewed war, the Samnite general, 
Pontius Telesinus, and his own whole army, had in their 
turn to pass under the yoke, and that all the arms and 
standards lost by the Eomans at the Caudine Forks 
were in the same battle recovered. This victory is 
ascribed to Papirius Cursor, as then consul : a hero 
who, celebrated alike for his fleetness of foot (whence 
his surname of Cursor), his bodily strength, and his 
great capacity for eating and drinking, reminds us of 
Bome of the knights of the Round Table. Livy considers 
that Alexander the Great, if after conquering Asia he 
had turned his arms on Europe, might have met with 
his match in the great Roman Dictator. To Papirius 
is at least due the honour of turning the tide decisively 
in this second Samnite war by a great victory in the 
Samnite territory, though the scene of it is uncertain. 
The triumph which was accorded to him was long re- 
membered for its magnificence ; the splendid armour, 
inlaid with gold and silver, the gilded shields and 
brilliant costumes stripped from the Samnite warriors, 
especially from their *^ Sacred Band,'' made a display 
never before seen at Rome. The shields were long 
after used on public occasions to decorate the Forum. 
The war lingered on for some four years more, until it 



APPIUS CLAUDIUS, 99 

was closed by another great defeat of the enemy at 
Bovianum, where their general, Statins Gellins, and a 
large body of troops, were made prisoners, and the 
Samnites were reduced to sue for peace. 

During the years occupied by this second Samnite 
war, the annalist has noted some points of internal 
history which deserve attention. One especially he 
terms, not without reason, "a second starting-point 
of liberty." It was the abolition of the power of im- 
prisonment for debt. He refers the passing of this 
law to the popular indignation excited by the out- 
rageous cruelty practised on an unhappy debtor by 
one of the Papirii, a house whose members appear to 
have been men of violent passions : but it was pro- 
bably a result which had been only waiting for its 
accomplishment. A member of another illustrious 
house — Appius Claudius " the Blind," great-grandson 
of the Decemvir — had made himself famous during the 
same period in more ways than one. He will best 
be remembered by the great public works carried out 
during his tenure of the censorship and subsequent 
consulate : the earliest of those gigantic aqueducts 
w^hich, even in their ruins, strike us to this day with 
admiration ; and more famous still, the great road con- 
necting Rome with Capua, known as the Appian 
Way. Nothing so great had been attempted since 
those Etruscan works which are ascribed to the Tar-^ 
quins. Diodorus tells us that they exhausted the 
whole revenue of Eome : Niebuhr considers that some 
of the state domain must have been alienated to pro- 
vide for their cost. But they were not the result of 



100 LIVY. 

tlie forced labour of the Eoman commons, which made 
the buildings under the ** Tyrants '* such a hateful 
memory: they probably furnished employment for the 
large bodies of Samnite or other prisoners, and so may 
have been completed at comparatively little cost to the 
state. Appius, when in power, showed the lofty and 
arrogant S23irit of his family. He held his office of 
censor — in direct defiance, it would appear, of the law 
to the contrary — for the full period of five years, 
which was the nominal duration of the appointment, 
and gave offence not only to the old patrician houses, 
but even to the moderate party, by placing on the roll 
of senators men who had no title to the honour except 
their wealth. His object may fairly be suspected to 
have been to attach such men to his own private in- 
terests by this obligation. He was the author of some 
other popular measures which may have had the same 
bearing ; amongst them, the causing to be published 
a kind of calendar containing the rubrics, as they might 
be called, of the pontifical law, which made days law- 
ful or unlawful for the transaction of business — a 
technical knowledge for which, hitherto, people had 
to depend upon the " colleges " of pontifices and 
augurs, whose members were always of the patrician 
order.' A few years afterwards followed an Act (the 
Ogulnian Law) which opened these colleges to the 
plebeians, and removed another of the few remaining 
disabilities, now chiefly religious, of that order. The 
A^alerian Law — permitting appeal from any 'magistrate 
to the people — which seems to have been virtually in 
abeyance, was in the same year formally re-enacted. 



LAST SAMNITE WAR. ^ 101 

The ^quians, who had given the Eomans no trouble 
since the days of the Gaulish invasion, had joined the 
Samnites in the last war, and the first step now taken 
was their chastisement. Standing alone, as they did, 
since the submission of the Samnites, they were no 
match for the Eomans. In fifty days, says the an- 
nalist, the consuls took forty-one of their towns, and 
"all but blotted out their very name from under 
heaven." They were yet strong enough, however, to 
make show of revolt from time to time. "What he 
calls a "trifling expedition" was also undertaken 
against some Umbrian banditti (so they are termed) 
who had been troublesome ; and by one of those mer- 
ciless proceedings not uncommon with the Eomans, 
two thousand of them were deliberately smoked to 
death in a cave. 

Some little difficulties occurred with the Marsians 
and Etruscans ; and the hostilities with these latter 
people led to a third and last Samnite war. The hopes 
of Samnium were raised by a new inroad of the Gauls 
into Etruria. The Etruscans — following in this the 
Eoman precedent — are said to have paid them a large 
sum as black -mail to induce them to withdraw, and 
further, to purchase their aid against Eome.* It 
seems certain, at all events, that the Gauls threatened 
Eome, and that the Samnites took advantage of the 
opportunity to make every effort to form, a grand 
coalition against her. They were already extending 
their own conquests in Lucania, from which district 

* The version which Livy gives of this transaction is con- 
tradicted by Polybius. 



102 



Livr. 



envoys were sent to entreat aid from Eome. The 
Samnites haughtily refused to listen to any remon- 
strance, or to withdraw their troops, and war was at 
once declared by the Eomans. 

The account given of the ensuing campaign, in 
which the first Scipio that we meet in history com- 
manded as consul, is far from clear or satisfactory : 
but it seems plain that, in spite of victories claimed 
and recorded, the Eomans were in some straits, since 
they called on Quintus Fabius in his old age, and in 
spite of his reluctance, to accept the consulship. But 
Etruria began to waver and talk of peace ; and both 
consuls marched victoriously through Samnium, lay- 
ing all waste with fire and sword where they went. 
But the Gauls appear again in Etruria — hired by 
Etruscan gold, as Livy tells us — and the Samnite 
general (another of the family of Gellius) took the 
bold step, which Livy's want of military knowledge 
prevents him from appreciating, of leaving his own 
country in the desperate state it was, and making 
a countermarch into Etruria, to fix its wavering 
allegiance by the presence of himself and a Samnite 
army. Whilst the consuls, with all the available force 
of Eome, marched into Etruria to meet him, another 
Samnite army threw itself into Campania, and laid 
waste the actual territory of the city of Eome. The 
alarm within the city itself was greater than it had been 
since the approach of the Gauls ; and the danger of the 
situation was increased by personal disputes between the 
consuls. However, the Samnites were checked ; and 
if we cannot trust the accounts which these Annals 



DEFEAT OF THE SAMNITES, 103 

give us of two great victories, at least tlie success was 
sufficient to place Rome in safety.^ The confederate 
forces, bound together by no common interest except 
enmity to Rome, did not long continue to act in con- 
cert ] the Etruscans and Umbrians preferred to defend 
their own country, and the Samnites and Gauls had 
to give up their march upon the city, and draw back 
upon the Apennines, followed by both Roman consuls 
and their armies. 

They were brought to battle at Sentinum. Fabius 
commanded on the right against the Samnites ; his 
colleague Decius on the left fronted the Gauls. He 
found these dreaded antagonists as hard to deal with 
as their ancestors. Twice, when his infantry seemed 
to make no impression, he charged in person at the 
head of his cavalry, and with success. But as tliey 
rode forward they came upon a new and bewildering 
enemy — the war-chariots of the Gauls ; at sight of 
which, and the rattle of their wheels, the Roman 
horses took fright, and the panic spreading to the 
riders, they wheeled and took to flight, communi- 
cating their own terror and confusion to the ranks of 
the legionaries. The battle on the left seemed hope- 
lessly lost ; when Decius, after trying in vain to rally 
his men by desperate personal exertions, bethought 
himself of the heroism of his father. ^* It is the 
privilege of our house," he said with a stern pride, 

* Livy says that in the second of these victories, besides 
killing 6000 of the enemy, and taking 2500 prisoners, the 
Konians ^^ recovered 7400" who had been made prisoners. 
This is proving somewhat too much. 



104 Livr, 

'^ to sacrifice ourselves as the ransom of our country." 
Like his father, he called upon the Pontifex to recite 
the formula of self-devotion, and added words of ter- 
rible imprecation of his own. 

" I send before me where I go Panic and Eout, Blood 
and Slaughter, the ciu'se of the gods alcove and of the gods 
below ; I involve with myself in destruction the standards, 
the weapons, the armour of the enemy ; be the fate of the 
Gauls and the Samnites even the same as mine ! " 

So, like his father, wrapping his cloak round him, 
he charged where the enemy were thickest, and fell 
covered with wounds. But not even all the faith of 
the Eoman legionaries in this heroic act of self-sacri- 
fice as '* the price of victory " could break the steady 
masses of the Gauls ; and had not Fabius been in a 
position by this time to reinforce his left wing, the 
Eomans would have been beaten. But he had broken 
the Samnites after an obstinate fight ; and wdiile he 
drove them to their camp, he now detached a force of 
cavalry and infantry to take the Gauls in rear. The 
victory was soon complete : the Sam.nite general fell 
defending his camp, and his troops, retaining their 
ranks and formation, retreated sullenly from the hard- 
fought field. The annalist gives the loss of the 
enemy at 25,000 killed, and 8000 prisoners; possibly 
not much exaggerated, since he admits a loss on the 
Eoman side, in killed alone, of 8200 — 7000 of them 
in the wing commanded by Decius. 

It was a great victory, won at a heavy cost ; and 
though the Samnites maintained a gallant struggle for 
nearly two years more, their efforts must have seemed 



FATE OF CAIUS PONTIUS. 105 

even to themselves almost desperate. The solemn 
ceremonies Avith which they prepared for their last 
campaign seem to show that they were consciously 
playing their last stake. A levy en masse was raised 
throughout Samnium of all who were able to bear 
arms, who had to serve on pain of death ; and an 
ancient and mysterious ceremony was revived by an 
aged priest — " out of an ancient linen roll," — by which 
each individual soldier was brought up to the altar — 
** more like a victim than a worshipper " — and com- 
pelled to swear fidelity to his leaders to the death, and 
A''engeance on any comrade who should desert his 
ranks. Some who refused the oath were slain, we are 
assured, on the spot, and the swearing-in of the rest 
Avent on over their dead bodies. A picked body of 
16,000, splendidly armed and equipped, was thus 
formed by co-optation — each man, after the first ten, 
choosing for himself a comrade till the number was 
complete, who from their white dress were known as 
the " Linen Legion.*' 

But the historian thinks that these stern vows of 
obligation rather awed the soldiers into obedience than 
gave them spirit to fight. They fought, he says, 
chiefly because they dared not fly, and ** feared their 
comrades more than their enemy." He has another 
victory of the Romans to record, before he closes this 
last book of his First Decade. He closes it before 
the " Samnite Hannibal " reappears once more upon 
the field (we cannot but wonder why he has been ab- 
sent so long); before Pontius of Telesina, the hero of 
the Caudine Pass, turns the tide of battle for a season 



106 



Livr. 



and defeats a Roman consul ; and before lie is himself 
in turn defeated by the Fabii, father and son, with 
the loss of 20.000 men, and taken prisoner to Eome, 
and so the great Samnite wars were ended. And we 
are spared from reading in his pages how, to the eter- 
nal disgrace of Rome, after having been led in chains 
to grace the triumph of the conquerors, the gallant 
Samnite general was beheaded that same day in the 
dungeons of the CapitoL 



i 



CHAPTEE VIL 

THE LOST DECADE. 
(B.C. 294-219.) 

The Second Decade of these Annals, from the eleventh 
to the twentieth book, is lost, and leaves a gap of 
seventy-five years. In that interval Eome had crushed 
the last opponents of her rule in Italy, had tried her 
strength against foreign enemies, and begun to enter- 
tain the lust of foreign conquest. The city of Tarentum 
had sought to escape the fate of its neighbours by call- 
ing in the aid of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus ; and Pyrrhus, 
who had an ambition to become a second Alexander, 
gladly embraced the opportunity of gaining a footing 
in Italy. So, for the first time, Eome and Greece met 
each other in arms. The ability of Pyrrhus as a gen- 
eral, the tactics of the Macedonian phalanx, with which 
the Eomans were as yet unacquainted, and the terror 
and confusion created by his elephants, won him two 
great battles, and Eome had never been in more 
imminent danger. But Pyrrhus vms compelled to quit 
Italy by the complete victory won by the Eomans at 
Beneventum, B.C. 275 ; and the Tarentines had to pay 
the penalty of having called him in. Other small 



108 



Livr, 



states made their final submission, and in B.C. 266 the 
Romans became the acknowledged masters of Italy. 

Eome then entered upon a new and extended career. 
She was tempted to interfere in Sicily, where the 
Carthaginians were becoming a formidable power, in 
too close neighbourhood not to be regarded with some 
jealousy. Carthage was the most flourishing "of the 
many Phoenician colonies, and had become the capital 
of Libya. Her merchant seamen, with the enterprise 
of their race, had spread themselves along the coasts of 
the Mediterranean, voyaging as far as Cornwall, if not 
to the Baltic, in one direction, to Sierra Leone in the 
other, and planting settlements wherever openings 
showed themselves for extending her commerce. She 
had flourishing factories and silver-mines in Spain, — 
was in possession of nearly all what is now Andalusia 
and Granada, — had gained possession of the whole of 
Sardinia and Corsica and the Balearic Isles, was 
spreading her colonies along the coasts of Sicily, and 
contemplating the occupation of the whole island. A 
horde of piratical adventurers called Mamertines 
(children of Mamers, or Mars), settled in Messana, were 
threatened with expulsion by Hiero, who from having 
been a soldier of fortune under Pyrrhus had risen to 
be king of Syracuse. They appealed for aid to Rome: 
the choice for them, they said, lay between Pome and 
Carthage ; they represented how dangerous it wordd 
be for the Romans to have a Carthaginian fleet sta- 
tioned within sight of Italy. The Romans did not 
require much persuasion ; and meauAvhile Carthage 
had already intervened, had arranged a peace between 



THE FIRST PUNIC WAR, 109 

the Mamertines and Hiero, and occupied tlie hnrl)oiir 
of Messana. A collision was inevitable : and although 
Hiero at first joined the Carthaginians, the early suc- 
cesses of the Eomans soon led him to change his 
policy, and he became and continued the steadfast ally 
of Eome. 

The two nations who now for the first time met in 
arms presented some strong national contrasts. The 
Eomans, soldiers from habit, as yet knew little of the 
sea. The Carthaginians, on the other hand, were born 
and bred sailors, but military service on land suited 
neither their habits nor their tastes. They preferred en- 
gaging for this service mercenaries from Spain and from 
Africa. It was not till after six years of hard training 
that their great general Hamilcar Barcas could bring 
into the field any infantry that could hold their ground 
against a Eoman legion. On the other hand, the 
Eomans had to take a Carthaginian war-galley as their 
model before they had any ships afloat that could meet 
those of their enemies with any hope of success. It is 
said that within two months they built and launched 
a hundred ships on the new pattern. Thus they be- 
came at length a match for the Carthaginians by sea, 
carried the war even into Africa, and after a struggle 
of twenty-three years, by the great naval victory off" 
the Agates Islands, had made themselves masters of 
all Sicily. This is known as the First Punic War.* 
An insurrection in Sardinia, breaking out while 
Carthage was occupied in suppressing a mutiny of 

* Tlie Romans called the Phoenicians Pmdj hence the adjec- 
tive ** Punic." 



110 LIV1\ 

her mercenary troops at home, gave the Eomans an 
opportunity of taking that island under their " pro- 
tection ; " and Corsica soon followed — '' one of the 
most detestable acts of injustice," remarks Niebuhr, 
" in the history of Eome." It was not probable that 
Carthage should tamely submit to be deprived under 
such circumstances of her most valuable provinces. 
She had been too weak to resist at the time : but she 
only waited the hour and the man, and when they 
came, began the Second Punic War. . 

Our annalist is now treading on safer ground, and 
has the opportunity of following more trustworthy 
authorities. In this war was taken prisoner Cincius 
Alimentus, a Eoman senator, who afterwards wrote a 
history of Eome (in Greek), and whom Livy more 
than once quotes with approbation. Cincius even 
made some personal acquaintance with the great Car- 
thaginian into whose power he had fallen. Eabius 
Pictor, too, now becomes a contemporary authority ; 
for he also served in these campaigns. But Livy has 
chiefly, though not always, followed the later history 
of Poly bins, who was born about thirty years after the 
conclusion of the war, and therefore might have had 
access to the best sources of information. Poly bins is 
generally fair and impartial ; and Livy, who had the 
whole of his history to guide him, though five books 
of it only have reached us, is more indebted to him 
than he seems willing to allow, — speaking of him 
somewhat grudgingly as *'an authority by no means 
to be despised." 



CHAPTER VIIL 

THE SECOND PUNIC WAR: THRASYMENUS AND CANN^. 

(books xxi.-xxii. B.C. 218-216.) 

" The war maintained against the Eoman people by 
the Carthaginians under Hannibal, of which I am 
about to write, is the most memorable," says the his- 
torian, ^* of all that were ever waged.'' Modern author- 
ities have conlirmed his judgment, so far at least as all 
ancient history is concerned. '^ It was no mere struggle," 
says Michelet, " to determine the lot of two cities or 
two empires ; but it was a strife on which depended the 
fate of two races of mankind, whether the dominion 
of the world should belong to the In do-Germanic or 
the Semitic family of nations." " ]N"ever," says Livy, 
" were two combatant states more powerful in all re- 
sources ; both were in their full strength ; they knew 
each other's tactics from former experience ; and they 
were so evenly matched, that the side which was finally 
victorious was at one time in the more imminent peril." 
And he adds that, strong as the opposing forces were, 
their mutual hatred was even stronger. 

The future hero of the war had indeed been sworn 
from his boyhood to be the enemy of Rome. His 



112 LIVY, 

father, Hamilcar Barcas, had brought up his three 
sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and Mago, to be, as he 
said, " three lion's whelps," to glut themselves on the 
blood of Rome. After he had been killed in Spain, 
the young Hannibal had continued to serve there 
under his brother-in-law Hasdrubal, who had succeeded 
to the command. Hasdrubal was assassinated ; the 
voice of the army, and of the Carthaginian commons, 
was loud in favour of Hannibal as his successor ; and 
the graver leaders of the opposite party in vain pro- 
tested against handing on the command to another of 
the powerful clan of Barcas, who seemed to threaten 
Carthage with a military despotism. The character 
of the young commander, and his first reception by 
the troops in Spain, is one of the most characteristic 
passages in Livy's work. 

" The veterans thought it was Hamilcar restored to them 
in living person : they saw the same decision in his face, 
the same fire in his eyes, the very same features and ex- 
pression. But he so behaved himself, that in a short time 
the memory of his father became one of his least claims to 
the popular favour. Never was a nature more fitted for 
two most different duties — to command and to obey. So 
that it would not be easy to decide whether he was a greater 
favourite with the general or with the troops. There was no 
officer whom Hasdrubal preferred to put in command when 
anything bold and energetic had to be done, and none in 
whom the men had more confidence, or under whom they 
would dare more. He had the greatest boldness in en- 
countering danger, and the coolest judgment in the midst 
of it. No toil could either fatigue him bodily, or depress 
his spirits. Heat and cold he could bear alike : his rule 
as to food and drink was set by natural appetite, not 



EANNIBAL. 113 

pleasure. His times of waking and sleeping did not de- 
pend on its being day or night ; sucli Lours as remained 
after his work was finished he gave to repose : and even 
that was not courted on a luxurious couch, or by enjoining 
silence. Many have seen him, wrapped in his military 
cloak, stretched on the ground amongst the pickets and 
sentinels. In his dress there was no difterence between 
him and other young men : his horse and his arms only 
were noticeable. He was by far the best soldier in the 
army, whether on foot or horseback ; the first to go into 
action and the last to retire. These admirable qualities 
were matched by as remarkable faults : an inhuman cruelty, 
a more than Punic perfidy; no truth, no reverence, no 
fear of the gods, no respect for an oath, no scruple of 
religion.'^ — (xxi. 4.) 

Such was the young general (he was just twenty-six 
years old), the great son of a great father, who was 
now to be matched against consuls and dictators of 
Eome, and after bafling and defeating them for a 
period of seventeen years, was himself finally over- 
come by circumstances rather than by superiority in 
arms. The quarrel between Rome and Carthage began 
in the debatable territory in Spain. The ostensible 
cause was the siege of Saguntum (now Murviedro) by 
Hannibal, the question being whether that town did 
or did not lie within the line of demarcation agreed 
upon by treaty between the Romans and Carthagini- 
ans in Spain. Ambassadors were sent from Rome to 
warn Hannibal to hold his hand from ^^allies of Rome;" 
and upon his refusing them an audience, they at once 
proceeded, in accordance with their instructions, to 
Carthage. Still they got no satisfactory answer; and 
Hannibal meanwhile pressed on the siege of Sagun- 

A.C.S.S., vol. L H 



114 LIVY. 

turn vigorously. Tn spite of a gallant resistance of 
eight months, during which he was himself severely 
wounded, it was taken hy storm, and every man in it 
put to the sword. The leading citizens had preferred 
a voluntary death : they had heaped all their valu- 
ables in the market-place, made a funeral jule of them, 
and thrown themselves upon it. 

The indignation of the Eomans w^as extreme, not 
unmixed with remorse fur having delayed their own 
interference too long. They sent a second embassy 
to Carthage, demanding peremptorily that the act of 
Hannibal should either be avowed or disavowed. The 
discussion in the Carthaginian senate was short and 
fierce. Their chief speaker concluded by saying : — 

" * Leave off talking about Saguntum and the Ebro ; and 
as we know what you have long been nursing in your 
hearts, let us have it out at last.' Then the Roman 
gathered his robe into a fold in front of him, and said, 
* Here we carry for you peace or war ; choose which you 
will.' At these words they shouted with equal fierceness in 
reply, * Give us which you please ! ' And when the other 
shook out the fold, and said he gave them 'war/ all 
answered that they accepted it, and that in the same spirit 
with which they accepted it they would carry it out.^' 

The Roman envoys crossed into Spain at once, to 
strengthen their own interests there, and to detach any 
tribes whom they could from the Carthaginian alliance. 
In Spain they met with little encouragement ; one 
tribe bade them seek for new allies in some quarter 
Avhere their base desertion of the Saguntines in their 
need was not known. They then passed on into Gaul. 



BASSIBAL'S LREAM. 115 

The o"h>ject was to prevent, if possihle, tlie advance 
which they already anticipated of Hannibal thi^ough 
Gaul into Italy. But the Gauls told them plainly that 
they saw no reason why they should thus force the 
Carthaginian to turn his arms against themselves in 
order to save the Eomans. 

Hannibal made his preparations carefully for the 
great expedition which he contemplated. He threw 
strong garrisons into Sicily, and appointed his brother 
Hasdrubal to command in Spain during his absence. 
He began his march towards the Pyrenees with 90,000 
foot and 12,000 horse, African and Spanish, and 37 
elephants. Before he crossed the Ebro, he had a 
dream or vision. 

"He saw in his sleep a warrior of godlike aspect, who 
said he had been sent from Jove to be the guide of Han- 
nibal into Italy ; only let him follow, and never turn his 
eyes away from him. At first, he thought, he followed the 
figure in awe. T\ithout glancing round him or behind him ; 
then, wondering in himself, with the curiosity of human . 
nature, what it could be that he was thus forbidden to look 
back at, he could no longer refrain his eyes ; when he saw 
behind him a serpent of enormous size rolling along and 
sweeping down trees and underwood, and followed by a 
storm and the crashing of thunder. Then, when he asked 
what the monster was or what it portended, he heard a 
voice say that it was * the desolation of Italy — only let him 
still press forwards, and ask no questions, but suffer the 
future to remain hidden from his view.' " — (xxi. 2i.) 

He had taken measures, by envoys and presents, to 
secure a passage for his troops through the country of 
the Gauls, and had made inquiries as to the most prao- 



116 . Livr. 

ticaLle passes of the Alps. He reduced such trihes as 
lay on that side the Pyrenees and still adhered to the 
Roman alliance ; and leaving Hanno with a strong force 
to occupy the district, made his way over the Pyrenees, 
and effected the passage of the Rhone in spite of some 
opposition from the Gauls on the opposite bank. 
Fertile in resources, he collected boats from all quar- 
ters, and even set his men to manufacture rough punts 
for the purpose ; while the elephants are said to have 
been got across on rafts, upon which they were tempted 
to trust themselves by very much 'the same stratagem 
as is used in India to this day, — by covering the rafts 
with earth, and driving the females in front. The 
Romans had two armies in the field, each under a con- 
sul; Publius Scipio was to command in Spain, while 
his colleague Sempronius was sent into Sicily, with 
orders to make a descent on Africa if he saw oppor- 
tunity. Scipio reached Marseilles too late to oppose 
Hannibal's passage of the Rhone, and he had but vague 
information as to his movements. While the heavier 
portion of the Carthaginian army Wc s crossing the 
river, an indecisive skirmish took place between some 
of their IN'umidian irregular horse and a troop of Roman 
cavalry. Hannibal was hesitating whether to engage 
the consul's arm}^, which he learnt was not far off, or 
continue his march for Italy, when the arrival of some 
chiefs of the Boii, a tribe of Cisalpine Gauls, who 
offered to be his guides and escort over the Alps, de- 
cided him not to waste his forces in a battle on that 
side, but to make by rapid marches for the foot of the 
mountains. He harangued his troops — if not in the 



PASSAGU OF THE ALPS. 117 

words whicli the Eomaii annalist gives us, yet, we may 
Avell conceive, in the like strain. The Alps, he told 
them, were the portals of Eome. Eome had been 
taken once already by the Gauls — those very Gauls 
whom they had so easily beaten j would they allow 
them to be better men than themselves? 

He was misled, early in the march, by the treachery 
of guides volunteered to him by one of the mountain- 
tribes, and for some time his army was in imminent 
danger. They were surrounded on all sides in a nar- 
row defile, attacked in front and rear, and masses of 
rock were hurled down upon them by the hostile na- 
tives ; but Hannibal was able to maintain the steadi- 
ness of his infjintry, and they forced their way through. 
Xine days after they left the plains, Hannibal looked 
down from the central ridge of the Alps on the plains 
of Italy. But his troops were fatigued, half frozen, 
and disheartened ; a heavy fall of snow during their 
two days' rest increased their misery ; and they found 
the descent still more difficult. In one place, a lai'ge por- 
tion of the mountain-road had been broken away (pro- 
bably by an avalanche), and they had to stop and re- 
pair it ; and here we have the well-known story of the 
cutting through the rocks, after heating them with large 
fires and then pouring on vinegar. The beasts, and 
especially the elephants, were half starved before they 
reached the nearest pasture-ground. . When he mus- 
tered liis troops, he found that he had scarcely left him 
half the number with which he had crossed the Ebro. 

The story of this passage of the Alps, as the annal- 
ist tells it, is picturesque in the highest degree ; but 



118 LTVr. 

the geography is of the vaguest, and it is impossible 
not to suspect that many of the details of the march 
are little better than a clever fancy picture. The writer 
confesses that he does not know for certain by which 
pass tliey crossed — whether it was by what he calls 
the '^ Pennine "pass, or the pass of " Cremo/' Wher- 
ever these were, it is most probable that the passage was 
made by way of the Little St Bernard, though some 
arguments have been advanced in favour of Mont 
Cenis. 

Scipio, meanwhile, having failed to check the ad- 
vance of Hannibal through Gaul, had re-embarked his 
troops for Italy, and prepared to meet his enemy on 
his descent into the plains of Piedmont. Putting him- 
self at the head of the army which he found there 
under the command of the praetors, he crossed the Po 
at Placentia, and threw himself in HannibaFs way, who 
was quite as anxious to meet him. Eoth generals, says 
the annalist, had the highest opinion of each other's 
ability. He gives us at some length th-e speeches 
which he supposes each might have addressed to their 
troops — taking this mode, as he so often does, of putting 
his readers in possession of the feelings with which 
each of the contending parties began the campaign. 
The Roman pointed out to his men that the enemy 
they were going to fight they had already beaten : Car- 
thage had surely not bred a new race of men since the 
last war ; moreover, this particular army was already 
travel-worn and half famished by their journey over 
the Alps. They must remember, too, that they were 
flighting for Pome : there was no second mountain- 



FIGHT AT THE TIC I SO. 119 

barrier like the Alps to protect tlie city— its sole de- 
fence and safety lay in their hands. 

The Carthaginian used a characteristic means of 
rousing the courage of his men. He offered the chance 
of liberty and life to any of their lately-made Gaulish 
prisoners who would act the part of gladiators, and 
engage in personal combat in sight of his army ; trust- 
ing that the fierce excitement of the spectacle would 
make them eager to fight for themselves. Then he 
made his harangue — reminding them of the perfidy 
and restless ambition of Eome, which left them no 
choice but war in self-defence ; and drawing a confi- 
dent comparison between his own tried experience in 
war, and the mutual good understanding between him- 
self and his troops, as opposed to this " six-months' 
general '' whom Eome had sent out, and the raw levies 
to whom he was almost a stranger. 

Their first encounter was a cavalry action on the 
banks of the river Ticino, in which the Eomans were 
worsted. The consul was wounded, and owed his life 
to the gallantry, some said, of a slave ; but Livy, al- 
ways leaning to the poetical side, prefers the story 
which ascribed the rescue to his son, afterwards to be 
known as Scipio '^ Africanus." The Eoman force had 
to recross the Po at night, break up their bridge, — so 
liastily that they left six hundred prisoners in the 
enemy's hands, — and take refuge under the walls of 
Placentia. Hannibal crossed the river by a bridge of 
boats, followed up his enemy, and offered them battle 
where they lay. But the consul was still disabled by 
his late wound, and had no confidence in his troops. 



120 LIVY. 

A large body of auxiliary Gauls had already broken 
out of camp, murdering the sentries, and gone over to 
Hannibal. Scipio again moved his quarters under 
cover of night, and fell back behind the little river 
Trebia. There he was joined by the other consul, 
Sempronius, who had been summoned in haste from 
Sicily, had thrown his army across the Straits of Mes- 
sina, and marched in forty days through the whole 
length of Italy. His colleague beiug disabled, Sem- 
pronius had virtually the sole command; and he was 
eager to match himself with this young Carthaginian 
general before his own year of oihce should expire. 
Some inconsiderable successes in cavalry skirmishes 
encouraged him, spite of Scipio's warnings, to risk a 
general engagement. He had to cross the river to get 
at his enemy ; and, in detiance of all military prudence, 
took his men into action wet, chilled with the cold, 
and without their morning meal. Yet, though the 
cavalry on the wings was soon driven in by the enemy, 
and thrown into confusion by his elephants, the ad- 
mirable steadiness of the Eoman legionaries might have 
saved the day, had not the Carthaginian made use of 
stratagem. A strong force of cavalry, planted judi- 
ciously in ambuscade, suddenly took them in the rear. 
The battle was now hopelessly lost ; yet a large body 
cut their way through the enemy, and got to Placentia, 
where at nightfall they were joined by Scipio with 
such remains of the broken army as had found their 
way into camp. The Eoman forces at once retreated 
— Sempronius into Etruria. Hannibal, after an at- 
tempt to cross the Apennines in terrible weather, in 



DEFEAT AT THRASYMENUS, 121 

whicli his troops suffered severely, wintered in Cisal- 
pine Gaul — so ftir master of the country. 

In accordance with the regular military policy of 
Eome, which on this point seems to ns so inconvenient, 
the command for the next year passed into the hands 
of new consuls. Rome had been thrown into con- 
sternation by the late disaster, and great exertions 
were made to raise new levies for the spring. Han- 
nibal had now crossed the Apennines, and made his 
Avay through the marshes below Florence, at the ex- 
pense of considerable suffering to his men and himself. 
He rode, we are told, the only elephant that had sur- 
vived the disasters of the Alps and the Apennines, 
and lost an eye from the inflammation caused by the 
exposure to weather which must have chilled his 
southern blood. Still he pressed on into Etruria, 
burning and plundering as he went. 

One of the new consuls was Flaminius, who in a 
previous year of office had reduced the Cisalpine 
Gauls. He was not more successful than his prede- 
cessors. He allowed himself to be attacked by Han- 
nibal in a defile near the lake Thrasymenus,* and 
suffered an overwhelming defeat. A thick mist, 
which concealed the enemy during their first attack, 
added to the confusion of the Romans. Their ad- 
vance cut their way through, only to surrender next 
day to Maharbal's cavalry. The consul himself fell ; 
and 15,000 of his men were either killed in the 

* Near the modern village of Passignano. The little stream 
called ^Savgiiinetto,' which falls into the lake, bears its record 
of the bloodshed. 



122 



LI VI. 



fight, or cut to pieces afterwards by the enemy's 
horse. 

Livy appears to have taken his account of the 
battle and its results mainly from the history of 
Fabius Pictor, who himself served in the war — 
possibly was engaged on this occasion. But the 
story of the reception of the terrible news at Rome is 
a far more finished picture than any likely to have 
been found in the earlier historian. 



" When the first tidings of this disaster reached Eome, 
great was the panic and confusion, and there was a general 
rush of the people into the Forum. Wives and mothers 
wandered about the streets, asking all they met what this 
sudden calamity was that men reported, and what had hap- 
pened to the army. And when the crowd, like a great public 
meeting, made its way to the election courts and the senate- 
house, and appealed to the magistrates for information, at 
length, a little before sunset, Marcus Pomponius the pryetor 
announced — ' We have been beaten in a great battle.' And 
though no further particulars could be learnt from him, 
yet men caught vague rumours one from the other, and 
went home saying ' that the consul with the greater part 
of his force were cut to pieces ; that the few who survived 
had either been made to pass under the yoke, or were 
scattered in flight throughout Etruria.' Various as the 
fate of the beaten army were the different forms of anxiety 
felt by those who had relatives serving under the consul : 
none knowing what their fate had been, and all uncertain 
what they had to hope or what to fear. Next day, and 
for some days afterwards, crowds thronged the gates, 
women in almost as great numbers as men,"^ waiting for 

* Nothing but such a crisis could excuse this breach of 
Koniau propriety. 



ALAHII 7xY ROME, 123 

some member of their family, or for news of him. They 
threw themselves upon all whom they met, with anxious 
inquiries, and could not be shaken off (especially from any 
whom they knew) until they had asked every particular 
from first to last. Then you might have marked the 
different countenances, as they parted from their infor- 
mants, according as each had heard cheering or mournful 
news ; while, on their way home, friends crowded round 
them to congratulate or condole. The women showed 
their joy or grief most conspicuously. One mother, who 
met her son suddenly at the gate returning safe, is said to 
have expii'ed on beholding him : another, who had heard 
a false report of her son's death, and was sitting weeping 
in her house, saw him returning, and died of over-joy. 
The praetors kept the senate sitting for several days from 
sunrise to sunset, consulting what commanders and what 
forces could be found, to resist the victorious Carthagin- 
ians.'' — (xxii. 7.) 

But the rulers of the city showed no weakness. 
Fabius Maximus was named Dictator in the emer- 
gency, and Minucius Kufus his " Master of the 
Horse." 

Though Hannibal was continuing his victorious 
march through Picenum and Apulia, Fabius, though 
superior in numbers, showed no disposition to engage 
him in the field. He was content to follow and watch 
his movements, to keep him from the important towns, 
and, above all, from a march on Eome. Once, w^hen 
he thought he had cut off his communications, the 
Carthaginian escaped him by stratagem ; two thousand 
oxen were driven into the hills at night, with lighted 
pine-torches tied to their horns, to give the appearance 
of a moving army, while Hannibal drew off his troops 



124 Livr. 

in another direction. But Hannibal felt that in the 
Eoman Dictator he had to deal with an able and wary 
opponent. The Master of the Horse, however, was 
a man of different temper, and chafed openly at the 
tactics of his chief, almost driving the troops into 
mutiny. During the absence of Fabius at Eome on 
public business, he gained some slight successes ; and 
this encouraged the party at home, who were already 
discontented at their general's inaction, to demand the 
passing of a bill to put the authority of the Master of 
the Horse on a level with that of the Dictator. The 
result was that, having agreed to divide the troops 
between them, Minucius was tempted by Hannibal 
into an engagement, and would have been utterly 
routed but for the support of Eabius and his division. 
With that generous public spirit which so often re- 
deemed the gravest faults in Eoman officers, Minu- 
cius acknowledged his mistake, and put himself for 
the future under the orders of the Dictator as before. 
Fabius suddenly rose high in popular estimation both 
in the army and at Eome ; and Hannibal, says Livy, 
"began at last to feel that he was fighting against 
Romans, and on Itahan soil." 

But the tenure of the Dictator's office, always brief 
and exceptional, ceased with the end of the year. The 
consuls who succeeded, however, carried on the cam- 
paign very much in the fashion which they had learnt 
from Fabius. Then came another change ; and one of 
the new consuls, Terentius Yarro — '' a butcher's sou," 
as his aristocratic opponents said, but at any rate a 
man of the people, and elected by plebeian votes — had 



BATTLE OF CANNJE, 125 

all tlie impatience and more than tlie imprudence of 
the late Master of the Horse. His colleague, Paulus 
^milius, who had been earnestly counselled by 
Fabius, was more cautious. There was again in the 
Roman camp the fatal evil of a divided authority, each 
consul commanding-in-chief on alternate days. The 
condition of the Carthaginian army was now critical 
in the extreme, for provisions were fast failing them ; 
the Eoman allies in Italy were growing impatient at 
seeing their lands ravaged with impunity by the in- 
vaders j so that both sides were eager for action. The 
rashness of Yarro precipitated the event on unfavour- 
able ground ; and the result was the almost total 
destruction of the Roman army on the disastrous field 
of Cannae. For a clear and distinct account of the 
battle, the student of military history must read Poly- 
bius, and not Livy, whose description, though highly 
picturesque, is sadly confused. As usual, the Roman 
cavalry was no match for that of the enemy ; and 
Hasdrubal, with his Gallic and Spanish horse, after 
driving in those opposed to them, charged the Roman 
infantry in the rear, -^milius had been wounded 
early in the day, and could no longer sit his horse ; 
his officers and men dismounted and fought desperately 
round him, as the Scottish knights did round King 
James at Flodden, and with the same result. " They 
died where they stood." The consul was last seen 
sitting down covered with blood ; an officer begged 
him to take his horse and save himself. He refused. 
" Tell them at Rome," said he, *Ho look to their watch 
and ward : and tell Fabius I remember his counsel 



126 Livr. 

dying, as I did while I lived. '* Varro, with a few 
horsemen, escaped from the field to Yenusia. 40,000 
foot and 2700 cavalry were said to have been left dead 
on the field of battle, including nearly all the officers 
of highest rank, the gallant Minucius among the num- 
ber ; 3000 infantry and 300 horse were made prisoners. 
When Mago bore the news of his brother's great vic- 
tory to Carthage, he poured out before the council 
there a bushel (some said three) of gold rings, each 
one taken from the finger of a Eoman knight who had 
died at Cannae.* Those who escaped to their own camp 
surrendered next day to Hannibal, except a small body 
who fought their way out and reached Canusium. 

" Such," says Livy, " was tlie fight at Cannae, not 
less memorable than the disaster at the Allia ; if less 
grave in its consequences, inasmuch as the enemy did 
not follow up liis success, yet more fatal in the utter 
destruction of the army. For tlie flight at the 
Allia, though it lost the city, saved the army." 
Hannibal missed the tide of opportunity. In vain 
did Maharbal — *' the best cavalry officer of the finest 
cavalry service in the world "t — propose to ride forward 
at once, and urge his chief to follow him with the 
main body, straight for Eome, promising him that " in 
five days he should sup in the Capitol." Hannibal 
preferred to wait ; and the Roman annalist admits 

* The reader will be reminded of the four thousand gilt 
spurs said to have been gathered from the bodies of the French 
knights slain by the Flemings on the field of Courtrai, A.D. 
1302 — hence known as the *' Battle of the Spurs." 

t Arnold. 



COXSTERNATION AT ROME. 127 

that, in his opinion, this delay was the salvation of 
the city. As to the panic and distress there, he 
despairs of giving his readers any adequate idea of it. 
" I fail under the burden of the task, and will not 
attempt to narrate it, since any description would only 
make it appear less than the reality." Two significant 
facts he mentions, which show the all but despairing 
efforts made by the authorities. Eight thousand slaves 
were armed and enrolled, and six thousand released 
criminals ; and recourse was had to the horrible expe- 
dient of human sacrifices, — to propitiate, if it might 
be, the unknown deities who fought against Rome. 
Two Gauls and two Greek prisoners — male and female 
— were buried alive ; *' a horrible rite, by no means in 
accordance with Roman usage/' 



CHAPTEE IX. 

SECOND PUNIC WAR : CANN^ TO ZAMA. 
(BOOKS XXII. -XXX. B.C. 216-202.) 

Once more the spirit of Eome rose superior to her 
misfortunes. News came in of the revolt of allies, 
of descents made by the Carthaginians on the coast 
of Sicily ; yet " no word was spoken of peace ; " and 
when Yarro, whose rashness had caused the disaster, 
brought the shattered remains of his army to the gates 
of Eome, he received the public thanks of the senate, — 
" because he had not despaired of the commonwealth." 
In the general demoralisation which followed the defeat, 
some of the younger officers had formed the idea of 
giving up the cause of Italy as lost, and seeking refuge 
and service under Hiero or some other friendly poten- 
tate ; but Yarro had scorned such counsel, and young 
Scipio had burst in with his sword drawn upon a 
party who were met to discuss it, and threatened to 
cut down the first man who refused then and there to 
swear fidelity to tlie Eepublic. 

Yery different, and as it might seem to us moderns 
very harsh, was the view taken at Eome of the con- 
duct of those troops who had allowed themselves to 



HANNIBAL IN CAPUA. 129 

bo marie prisoners at Cannae. By Hannibal's permis- 
sion, they had sent delegates to Eome to treat for 
their ransom ; but the senate, unmoved by the piteous 
entreaties of their relatives, sternly decided that the 
services of men who had preferred life to honour were 
not worth the purchase. Even those troops who had 
escaped by flight were sentenced, by way of punish- 
ment, to serve in Sicily until the war should be con- 
cluded. Five years afterwards, when the authorities 
in their emergency were arming even slaves to serve in 
the legions, these men prayed leave to wipe out their 
disgrace in any hardest service that could be found in 
their native country ; and the senate coldly rejected 
their prayer. 

Hannibal moved into Samnium, and thence into 
the plains of Campania, receiving the submission of 
several towns, the most important of which was the 
rich town of Capua. This loss was felt by the Eomans 
as only second to that of Eome itself. But the Car- 
thaginian commander, whose strongest arm was his 
cavalry, did not attempt any great operations, and the 
winter spent by his army amidst the luxury of Capua 
is said to have demoralised it more than all the sufferings 
of the Alps or the campaign. Marcellus, now in com- 
mand in that district, did little more than watch the 
enemy's movements. 

In Gaul the Eomans had been more unfortunate : a 
consul, Posthumius, was attacked in making his way 
through a forest (Eoret de Lago), and cut to pieces 
with great part of his army ; and their progress there 
was checked for the present. The Eoman fleet had 

A.C.S.S., vol. i. I 



130 Livr. 

enougli to do to watch the" coasts of Italv, nnr! to 
form a coalition of the ^tolians and other tribes on 
the Macedonian frontier against King Philip, with 
whom Hannibal had just concluded an alliance. 

Eut in other quarters the tide was already turning 
for the Eomans. In Sardinia, a great battle had been 
won by Manlius, who was in command there as prsetor, 
against the combined forces of the Sardinians and Car- 
thaginians, the latter having three of their generals 
taken prisoners. In Spain, a year before, the brothers 
Publius and Cnseus Scipio had driven the Carthagin- 
ians over the Ebro, and when the}^ heard that Has- 
drubal was marching strong reinforcements through 
the country to the aid of his brother Hannibal in 
Italy, they had united their forces, met him on the 
Ebro, and totally defeated him ; thus materially crip- 
pling the great Carthaginian's operations against Eome. 
They now again gained a decisive victory, inflicting 
on the Carthaginians a loss of 13,000 killed, and 
making a considerable number of prisoners, besides 
what the Eoman annalist evidently considers an im- 
portant capture of "nine elephants." This success 
was at once followed by the defection of nearly all the 
Spanish tribes from the Carthaginian alliance ; and 
both Sardinia and Spain were for the present secured 
to the Eomans. 

The next year (b.c. 214) saw the joint consulship of 
Quintus Pabius and Marcus Marcellus, ^'the Shield 
and Sword of Eome." The people were on the point 
of electing two other candidates, when Pabius, who as 
the outgoing consul was returning officer, bade them 



REVOLUTIOX IN SYRACUSE. 131 

reconsider their vote — " they had to elect a match for 
Hannibal." Nothing perhaps shows the true great- 
ness of Fabius more than his thus boldly risking the 
charge of forcing himself upon the people ; for there 
is no doubt that he had his own election in view, and 
there was no precedent for thus holding a consulship 
two years in succession. 

Extraordinary exertions had been made to raise 
both men and money for the ensuing camj)aign ; and 
two consular armies of unusual strength, under able 
commanders, now pressed Hannibal close in Campania. 
He failed in an attempt on Tarentum ; his lieutenanb 
Hanno was defeated by Gracchus at Beneventum ; 
Samnium was ravaged by Fabius, in punishment of 
its revolt from Eome ; and vigorous preparations were 
made for the siege of Capua. 

Marcellus, however, was called off before the end of 
the year to the scene of his future glory in Sicily. 
King Hiero of Syracuse — for forty-seven years the 
steady ally of Eome — was dead, and had left the 
government to his grandson, a mere boy, caring only 
for his pleasures. His two uncles, his guardians and 
ministers, were inclined to the Carthaginian interest ; 
and Hannibal had amongst other agents at his court 
a man of enterprise and ability in the person of Hip- 
pocrates. The young prince was assured that the 
Eoman power was irretrievably broken ; and, tem^jted 
by the offer of being made king of all Sicily, in spite 
of the advice of some older and wiser counsellors, he 
made an alliance with Carthage. He was assassinated 
very soon afterwards on an expedition against Leon- 



132 



Livr. 



tini ; and tlie cry was raised in S^Tacuse for " a free 
Eepublic/' and a re-alliance with Eome. Andrano- 
dorus, one of the young king's uncles, seized and held 
the citadel in the interests of the royalist party; but he 
and his friends surrendered it to the republicans when 
they found that the popular feeling was too strong. 
Accusations of plotting against the liberties of Syra- 
cuse, and of seeking to re-establish the ^' tyranny, '^ 
were soon brought against him ; and the result was 
an outbreak of popular fury, and an indiscriminate 
massacre of the whole party, and of all the descendants 
of Hiero. The Eomans, as soon as they learnt the 
state of affairs, sent their fleet at once to Syracuse to 
support their own interests against those of Carthage ; 
and this formidable demonstration encouraged their 
adherents in the city to renew the old alliance with 
Eome. 

But Hippocrates, the zealous and energetic agent of 
Hannibal and Carthage, was by no means content with 
such an arrangement ; and he found a centre of opera- 
tions in the Sicilian town of Leontini, which was not 
inclined to submit itself either to Syracuse or to Eome. 
Marcellus now arrived to take the command in Sicily 
in person. He took Leontini by storm ; and finding 
there a large body of deserters from the Eoman fleet 
and army, he had two thousand of them first scourged 
and then beheaded. This terrible vengeance struck 
the Syracasan soldiers with a not unreasonable horror 
of Eoman cruelty ; Hippocrates and his brother, who 
had escaped from the slaughter at Leontini, were 
acknowledged as leaders by the army, and a counter- 



MARCELLUS BESIEGES SYRACUSE. 133 

revolution in favour of Carthage took place in the 
city of Syracuse, and the gates were closed against 
the Romans. 

Marcellus at once invested the place by sea and 
land. The siege has an especial interest as the first 
instance on record of a scientific defence. A studious 
recluse of seventy-four, a mathematician and astro- 
nomer, for a long time baffled the unscientific efforts 
of the whole Eoman force. This was Archimedes, 
who for many years had employed his skill in the 
service of King Hiero. It would appear that he first 
introduced the plan of loopholing the walls at different 
heights ; his catapults and similar machines — the artil- 
lery of those times — were of all varieties of range and 
calibre ; and there was one tremendous engine like an 
enormous crane projected from the walls, and heavily 
weighted at the nearer end, while the other was fur- 
nished with a huge grappling claw; this, when suddenly 
depressed, would catch hold of one of the enemy's 
ships (which were brought up to attack the sea-wall), 
lift it bodily out of the water, and then let it drop 
suddenly back so as to sink it with its whole crew. 
The defence was so successful, and the natural position 
of the city so strong, that the siege was speedily re- 
duced to a close blockade. It was not until this had 
lasted a year that Marcellus at last gained possession 
of the city by a surprise. A weak place in the forti- 
fications had been discovered, in the quarter called 
EpipolcB ] and while the citizens were engaged in 
deep carousals at the festival of Diana, two picked 
cohorts scaled the walls at nightfall, and without 



134 



Ll VY. 



much difficulty made themselves masters both of that 
quarter and of the strong-work called Hexapylon. 
What remained was an easy conquest. 

" When Marcellus entered the fortifications, and from 
the high ground looked down, and saw lying at his feet the 
city, wellnigh the fairest in these times, he is said to have 
shed tears, partly of joy at the great deed he had accom- 
plished, partly of regret for the ancient glories of the place. 
The sinking of the Athenian fleet there, the destruction of 
two great armies and two renowned commanders,* came 
into his mind ; the many wars waged against Carthage 
with varied success ; its many powerful despots and kings 
— Hiero especiall}^, not only as the most recent of its rulers, 
but memorable, above and beyond all that merit and for- 
tune had given him, for his good services to the Eoman 
people. When all this crowded on his memory, and the 
thought occurred that now in one moment all its magnifi- 
cence would be given to tlie flames and reduced to ashes, 
he sent some Syracusans, who had been serving in his 
camp, to speak the enemy fair, and induce them to sur- 
render." — (xxv. 24.) 

A portion of the city was surrendered, but only to 
be given up to indiscriminate plunder — in spite of 
Marcelius's tears. The rest, with the citadel, still held 
out ; and vigorous attempts were made by the Cartha- 
ginians to relieve it. But the force which was sent 
from Carthage perished almost to a man from malaria 
in the marshy ground where they lay — Hippocrates 
(who had broken out of Syracuse) among them. Their 
fleet also, partly from unfavourable winds, and partly, 
ll would seem, from lack of spirit in its commander, 

* xxicias and Demosthenes. 



REDUCTION OF SICILY. 135 

did not venture to encounter tliat of the Eomans ; and 
the discontent and mutiny of the foreign mercenaries 
within the city itself led at length to its Letrayal to 
Marcellus. There was not much fighting at the cap- 
ture j but in the scene of violence, plunder, and 
wanton bloodshed that followed, one notable life was 
lost. Archimedes was found, unconscious of all the 
noise and tumult round him, absorbed in working out 
a mathematical problem on a smooth bed of sand. To 
the great regret, it is said, of Marcellus, he was killed 
by a Eoman soldier who knew nothing of science or 
its professors. The city was completely sacked by the 
soldiery; and the plunder, Livy tells us, was more 
valuable than would have been even that of Carthage 
itself. 

Other towns in Sicily, which had revolted from 
Eome to Carthage when they saw as they thought 
their opportunity, now hastened to offer their sub- 
mission ; but Marcellus dealt with them all with the 
utmost severity, even putting to death the chief 
citizens of the anti-Koman party. His conduct left 
such a terrible impression on the memories of the 
Sicilians, that when in a subsequent consulship he was 
appointed to the command in the island, they sent to 
implore iho, Eoman senate not to send him there. A 
half-caste officer of Hannibars, Mutines, gave still 
some trouble in Sicily, and even repulsed Marcellus in 
a pitched battle. Marcdlusls xSMlipf^'iy™ had 

now expired, and he llarrieftHb^^tfie % ^nJ03'[ his 
triumph, leaving to onelof ffle flewieisula^SLBevinus, 
the difficulty and the l^iflg^Q|c|j|^||(^flgieJsub- 



136 Livr. 

jiigation of Sicily. He was able to inform the senate, 
at the expiration of his year of office, with a great 
amount of self-complacency, that the island was thor- 
oughly got into order, and that not a Carthaginian was 
left there. 

Our author's annalistic method has recorded these 
events in Sicily under the three successive years in 
which they took place. It is more convenient here to 
return for a while to the contemporary events in other 
fields where Rome was carrying on the war.* In 
Italy, Hannibal had surprised and taken Tarentum ; 
Gracchus, one of the consuls who succeeded Fabius 
and Marcellus, was killed in an ambuscade ; and an 
old centurion, of more courage than generalship, who 
succeeded to his command, was defeated and slain by 
Hannibal with 15,000 of his men; but all these dis- 
asters were compensated to the Romans by the fall of 
Capua in the following year. 

The Romans were determined on the reduction of 
their rebel dependency. They drew round it all their 
available force in Italy ; and after giving notice to all 
who would make their peace with Rome to evacuate 
it before a certain day, they encircled it with a triple 
line of works. Hannibal hastened to its relief; but 
his terrible cavalry could make no impression on the 
Roman lines ; and with a sudden bold change of plan, 
by a rapid night -march he struck for Rome. He 
took nearly the same route that the Gauls had taken 
long ago ; and the terror and confusion in the city at 

* The chronology of these operations, as given by Livy, 
bears traces of confusion. 



FATE OF CAPUA, 137 

the iiews of 'his approacli was scarcely less ttan had 
foliowed the disaster of the Allia. Though he encamped 
within three miles of the gates, his real object Ava& 
but to draw off the investing army from Capua ; and 
he had no means, and probably no thought, of attempt- 
ing an assault on Eome. He plundered the rich lands 
round the city unchecked, spite of the rage and grief 
of the citizens, who had seen no enemy so close to 
their gates for nearly a hundred and fifty years. He 
rode up to reconnoitre in person, with his staff, Lisy 
tells us, to the Colline gate; but that was all he 
saw of Eome. He gained no respite for Capua ; 
only a very small portion of the besieging army was 
recalled for the defence of the capital; and balked and 
disappointed, he retired upon Bruttium, and left the 
Capuans to their fate. 

That fate was not long delayed, and it was terrible. 
They entertained no hopes of mercy from the Eomans. 
Some of the chief citizens took poison before the sur- 
render. Such senators as were found alive were 
scourged and then beheaded. It is said that, while 
they were bound for execution, an order from Eome 
reached the consul Fulvius for their reprieve ; that he 
placed it in his bosom unread, and bade the execution 
proceed. Most of the inhabitants were sold for slaves, 
and all their lands and other property were confiscated. 
Capua had been Hannibal's one great conquest in 
Italy, and the blow to his cause there was proijor- 
tionate. 

In Spain matters had gone worse for the Eomans. 
It is more than probable that in the account which 



138 Livr, 

Livy has borrowed from earlier writers of the exDloiis 
of the two Scipios we have only the boastful exagger- 
ation of their family annals ; it is only certain that 
they were both in succession defeated and slain by 
Hasdrubal, a short time before the fall of Capua, and 
that the Eomans were driven back beyond the Ebro. 
It was reserved for a younger member of the house to 
avenge the deaths of his relatives and retrieve the 
honour of Eome. But it is by no means certain that 
the acts of young Publius Scipio have not received 
the same kind of decoration in the family chronicle 
as those of his father and uncle. His extraordinary 
promise had led, we are told, to his election to public 
office before he was of legal age ; and now, when a 
proconsul was to be chosen to succeed to the command 
in Spain, and men hung back from an honour which 
involved so much responsibility under such discourag- 
ing prospects, young Scipio came forward as a candi- 
date, and was elected by acclamation. 

He is so evidently a favourite, both with the 
Eoman annalist and with Poly bins whom he has 
followed, that we have his character drawn by partial 
hands. But there can be no question of his having 
been an extraordinary man, and of his exercising a 
kind of fascination over those who were brought in 
contact with him. Strange tales were told of his 
birth, and of a mysterious inspiration which he re- 
ceived, or thouglit he received, from heaven ; of his 
spending hours alone in the temple of Jupiter on the 
Capitol before he engaged in any important business. 
All such tales he was at least at no pains to contra- 



PUBLIUS SCIFIO. 139 

diet, and men regarded him with a certain awe as well 
as admiration. 

He took out with him to Spain large reinforcements, 
and after wintering at Tarraco (Tarragona), crossed the 
Ebro in the spring, and marched straight upon l^ew 
Carthage (Cartagena) — the most important of the Car- 
thaginian towns, the base of their military operations, 
and the depot of their stores and treasure. He stormed 
it by crossing the wide lagoon which then lay at its 
back ; and for some time the place was given np to 
general massacre and pillage. An immense booty was 
found there, besides naval stores and war material of 
all kinds. The artificers were forced into the Eoman 
service, and the able-bodied citizens and their slaves 
were compelled to serve as rowers in the fleet. But 
there were other prisoners taken in the place to whom 
Scipio gave very different treatment. These were the 
hostages from the several towns of Spain, whom the 
Carthaginians had sent there for safe custody. The 
Eoman commander, by a studied moderation and 
courtesy, sought to impress on them how much it 
would be to the advantage of themselves and their 
countrymen to be on the side of Rome rather than of 
Carthage. One anecdote will serve at once as an 
example of Scipio's policy, and of Livy's facility as a 
writer of romance. 

" A captive was brought before him by his soldiers — a 
grown-up maiden of such remarkable beauty, that wherever 
she moved she attracted the eyes of all. Scipio inquired 
her country and her parentage, and ascertained amongst 
other things that she was aftianced to a young chief of the 



140 , LIVT. 

Celtiberi, whose name was Allucius. He at once Jient for 
her lover and her parents from their homes, and heard in 
the meanwhile that the youth was passionately attached to 
her. As soon as they arrived, he addressed himself to the 
lover more particularly than to the parents. * I address 
myself/ said he, ' as one young man to another, that there 
may be less embarrassment between us in this interview. 
When your betrothed bride was brought to me by our 
soldiers, I heard that you were very much in love with 
her — a fact which indeed her beauty makes me readily be- 
lieve,, inasmuch as, were I at liberty to indulge the passions 
natural to my age, especially in an honourable and lawful 
way, and if public duty did not engross all my thoughts, I 
might have claimed indulgence had I become des]3erately 
enamoured of some lady myself. Your passion at least I 
can favour, and I do. Your betrothed has been treated 
with the same respect while in my charge as she would 
have been under the rooi of her own parents and your 
future connections. She has been kept safe for you, that 
I might present her to you untarnished, a gift worthy alike 
of myself and you. This one return I bargain for in re- 
payment for this gift of mine — become the friend of the 
Eoman people. And if you believe me to be a man of 
honour, as these tribes know my father and my uncle to 
have been, I would have you learn that there are many 
like us in the state of Eome ; and that no nation can be 
named at this day upon earth whom you ought less to wish 
to have for enemies to you and yours, or should prefer as 
friends.' The young chief, overwhelmed with embarrass- 
ment and joy, grasped Scipio's hand, and called upon all 
the gods to repay his benefactor an obligation which itwould 
never be in his own power to discharge in any way cor- 
respondent to his own feelings and Scipio's claims upon 
his gratitude. Then the maiden's parents and relatives 
were summoned. Finding that she was to be restored to 
them gratuitously, whereas they had come prepared with a 



DISAFFECTION OF THE ALLIES, HI 

considerable weight of gold for her ransom, they began to 
entreat Scipio to receive it from them as a present, pro- 
testing that in so doing he would confer upon them an 
obligation not less than this free and honourable restoration 
of their daughter. Seeing them so earnest in their request, 
Scipio promised that he would accept the gold, and bade 
it be laid at his feet. Then, calling Allucius to him, he 
said, ^ As an addition to the dowry which you will receive 
from your father-in-law, take this as my wedding present ; ' 
and he desired him to take the gold and keep it for himself. 
The bridegroom took his leave, delighted alike at the gift 
and the compliment, and went home to fill the ears of his 
countrymen with the praises of Scipio. ' There had come 
upon earth a hero like unto the gods, conquering all men 
not only by his valour, but by his kindness and munifi- 
cence.' And he straightway made a levy of his retainers, 
and, with fifteen hundred picked horsemen, returned in a 
few days to Scipio." — (xxvi. 50.) 

But neither the popularity of the new Eoman 
general with all the Spanish tribes, nor a subse- 
quent victory over Hasdrubal which is ascribed 
to him, enabled him to prevent the latter from 
marching to the support of his brother Hannibal in 
Italy. 

Meanwhile the state of things in Italy itself looked 
gloomy in the extreme. In spite of Marcellus's conquest 
of Syracuse, in spite of the recovery of Capua, the 
distress in Eome was severe, and there was disaffection 
among her allies. Twelve of the thirty colonial towns 
distinctly refused the usual contributions of men and 
money — " they had neither men nor money to give." 
The resources of Eome would have failed utterly and 
at once, had the remaining eighteen followed the ex- 



142 Livr, 

ample. Eut instead of this, they not only famished 
the quota demanded, but said that " more was ready 
if required." The ravages of Hannibal made corn 
scarce and dear; and a new tax, absolutely neces- 
sary to maintain the navy, led to such imminent 
danger of insurrection, that the commons were only 
pacified by the gallant self-devotion and liberality 
of the senators and knights, who placed at the dis- 
posal of the treasury commissioners all their gold 
and silver plate and coined money, with only some 
small personal reservations. The sacred treasure, re- 
served for any great emergency, was also brought 
out and employed — "four thousand pounds' weight 
of gold." 

The next campaigns were unfortunate. Of the com- 
manders against Hannibal, Fulvius was killed, and his 
army destroyed ; and Marcellus, consul for the sixth 
time in the following year, while reconnoitring with 
his cavalry, met his death in an ambuscade, in which 
also his colleague Crispinus was mortally wounded. 
Thus Eome lost both her consuls on one fatal day. 
The two armies threw themselves into Yenusia and 
Capua. And now came news that Hasdrubal had 
slipped by Scipio in Spain, had turned the Pyre- 
nees, crossed Gaul, and was on his way to join his 
brother Hannibal. He crossed the Alps by the same 
route which the latter had taken, but more rapidly, 
and with much less difficulty, than his brother had 
done. He seems to have marched through Lombardy 
without opposition ; and Livius, the consul sent to 
oppose him' on the frontier, was obliged to fall back 



VICTORY OF THE METAURVS. 143 

Lefore Mm.* But the despatches which were to an- 
nounce to his brother his arrival and his plans fell into 
the hands of the other consul, Claudius ]^^ero, wlio lay 
at Yenusia watching Hannibal ; and he at once deter- 
mined on a course which has always been admired for 
its boldness, and perhaps also for its success. He 
made a rapid night-march with a picked body of 7000 
men, and before Hannibal missed liim, was far on his 
road to join his colleague, and so crush Hasdrubal, if 
possible, by their united weight, before he could join 
his brother. The manceuvre was thoroughly success- 
fuL Unwillingly the Carthaginian, after an attempt 
at retreat, gave battle on the Metaurus river, and was 
there utterly defeated, with a loss which was no doubt 
heavy, however Eoman boasts may have exaggerated 
it. Livy pays an honest tribute to the gallantry of 
Hasdrubal : great in many battles, he says, he was 
never so great as in this. 

" He it was who kept his men up, while they fought, by 
cheering them, and facing every personal danger like them- 
selves ; he it was who, when they were tired out, and gave 
way from very weariness and fatigue, reawoke their spirit 
now by entreaties and now by reproaches ; he rallied them 
when they fled, and restored the battle at many points 
where the struggle had ceased. At last, when it was clear 
that the day was the enemy's, refusing to survive the fate 
of the army which had followed him as leader, he spurred 
his horse right into one of the Eoman cohorts. There Jie 
fell, fighting to the last, as became a son of Hamilcar and 
a brother of Hannibal." — (xxvii. 49.) 

* As to the details of this campaign, Arnold remarks that 
**what we have in Livy is absolutely worthless.'* 



144 



Livr. 



Xero hurried back as rapidly as he came; found 
Hannibal still waiting news of his brother ; sent two 
Carthaginian prisoners into his camp to bear the tid- 
ings of their defeat ; and bade the severed head of 
Hasdrubal be thrown down in front of the Carthagin- 
ian outposts, that Hannibal might recognise the dead 
flice (he had not looked on it for eleven years), and 
know by this sad token the fate of his brother's army. 
So much more of the barbarian spirit had a Eoman 
consul, on the Roman annalist's own showing, than the 
great Carthaginian whom it was the fashion at Rome 
to call perfidious and cruel; for Hannibal had, not 
long ago, given honourable burial to the body of 
Marcellus, as he had' to Gracchus in Lucania, to 
Paulus ^milius after Cannae, and as he sought to do in 
the case of Flaminius, the consul who fell at Lake 
Thrasymenus. 

Alw^ays melodramatic, Livy tells us that when Han- 
nibal looked on the severed head of his brother, he 
said that " he recognised there the fate of Carthage." 
Whatever be the truth of the story, there is no doubt 
that the great victory on the Metaurus was the turning- 
point in the fortunes of the contending powers. Hal- 
lam classes it amongst the few great battles " of which 
a contrary event would have essentially varied the 
drama of the world." Rome drew breath after it, as 
freed, almost beyond hope or expectation, from a ter- 
rible peril. It is hardly possible to do justice by any 
translation to the line chapter in wdiich the annalist 
describes the reception in the city of the good news. 



jor /xV ROME, 145 

It is the counter-picture to the scene after Thrasy- 
monus. ^ 

" While the city was in this state of anxious suspense, 
there came a rumour, vague at first, that two Narnian 
horsemen had ridden from the hattle to the Eoman force, 
which lay watching the passes of Umbria, with the news 
that the enemy had received a heavy blow. Men took it 
in with their ears rather than their minds, as too great and 
too joyful to be entertained in thought, or really believed. 
The very rapidity of the communication was an objection, 
for the battle was said to have taken place only two days 
before. Soon a letter was brought in from Manlius, from 
the camp, announcing the arrival of the horsemen. When 
this letter was carried through the Forum to the court of 
the city praetor, the senate rose in a body from their hall ; 
and such a rush and struggle was made by the people to- 
"wards the doors of the senate-house, that the courier could 
not make his way through, but was dragged to and fro by 
eager inquirers, demanding loudly that he should read it on 
the public rostra before he carried it in to the senate. At 
last the crowd was forced back, and kept under restraint 
by the authorities, and the joyful news was circulated by 
degrees, though men's minds were as yet unable to realise 
it. The letter was read in the senate first, then in public 
to the people ; and, according to their various dispositions, 
some felt an assured joy, others would give no credit to the 
tale until they had either heard or seen despatches from 
the consuls themselves. 

" Presently word was brought that official messengers 
were coming. Then young and old went forth to meet them, 
each longing to be the first to drink in such joyful tidings 
with eyes and ears. There was one continuous stream of 
people out as far as the Milvian bridge. The officers en- 

♦ See p. 122. 
A.C.S.S., vol. i. K 



146 Livr. 

tered the Foiiim, the centre of a crowd of all ranks. Some 
questioned them, and some those who escorted them, as lo 
what had happened ; and as each heard the news, that the 
enemy's forces and their commander were cut to pieces — 
that the Roman legions were safe — that the consuls were 
unharmed, — the}^ at once imparted their joy toothers. . . . 
The temples during the next three days were crowded ; 
wives and mothers in holiday attire, leading their children 
with them, were giving thanks to heaven, and casting off 
all fear, as though the war were already ended/^ — (xxvii. 
50, 51.) 

Meanwhile the conquest of Spain was rapidly being 
accomplished under Scipio. He won a great victory 
over- Hasdrubal, known as "the son of Gisgo," to 
distinguish him from the brother of Hannibal. Such 
towns as still held out against the Romans hastened to 
make their submission ; and the defeated general em- 
barked what remained of his army for Africa, leaving 
Spain for the present so far clear of Carthaginians, 
that Scipio's lieutenant, Silanus, was able to announce 
to him that " the war was over." But the boast came 
somewhat too soon. 

The Roman commander was now eager to carry the 
war into the enemy's country. He was not content to be 
the conqueror of Spain : he longed to add to his glories 
the reduction of Carthage itself. He crossed at once 
into Africa, with some hope of securing to the Roman 
interests one of the most powerful of the native 
princes, Syphax, king of the Masaesylians, who had in- 
vited liim to a conference. At his table Scipio found 
himself seated next to his late opponent, Hasdrubal 
Gisgo, andj if we may trust the partial historian. 



4 
I 



SCIPIO IN SPAIN, 147 

charmed him, as he did all who came into personal 
relations with him, by the grace of his bearing and 
conversation. Thinking that he had secured Syphax 
— who appears to have been only playing Avith him — 
he returned to Spain, to find some new troubles there. 
He had to " punish" certain towns which had probably 
taken occasion of his absence to revolt ; and he did so 
effectually. Then there arose a far more serious diffi- 
culty, in the mutiny of a portion of his own troops, on 
the ground of the hopeless arrears of pay, and their 
long absence from home ; and in the midst of it he was 
seized with a dangerous illness. The report that he 
was dying roused some Spanish tribes once more to 
take up arms ; and, as a proof of his great personal in- 
fluence, and the widespread awe and admiration which 
he inspired, no sooner did their leaders hear he was 
recovering than they were struck with complete panic. 
The mutiny among his own men he put down with a 
strong hand, and with no little diplomacy : the ring- 
leaders were cleverly secured, and straightway exe- 
cuted. With the revolted Spaniards, who now fought 
in sheer despair of pardon, he had a desperate battle ; 
but he was completely victorious, and Mago, the last 
of the Carthaginian generals who clung to Spain, was 
summoned away to head a descent upon Liguria, and, 
if possible, to rally jSTorthern Italy against the Eomans. 
Scipio himself hurried to Rome, to stand for the 
consulship. He was elected ; but, to his great disap- 
pointment, he could not get a commission to take the 
command in Africa. Old Fabius Maximus — not too 
old to make a very long speech, in our annalist^s pages 



148 Livr. 

— protested against it as a patent imprudence, so long 
as Hannibal maintained his ground in Italy. 

He did maintain his ground there four years longer, 
though he did scarcely more. He confined himself 
chiefly to Bruttium, and the Romans seem never to 
have ventured to attack him in the field ; but the want 
of support from Carthage, the difficulty of maintaining 
his troops, and the Italian malaria, were far more har- 
assing enemies. His brother Mago made his descent 
upon Genoa from the Balearic Isles, where he had 
collected a strong naval and land force ; but though 
his capture of the town drew numbers of the Ligurians 
and Gauls to his standard, he was unable to carry out 
his instructions to effect a junction with Hannibal. 
He was defeated, after an obstinate battle, by the 
Roman force sent to oppose him, and was mortally 
wounded. It was at this juncture that both he and 
his brother were recalled to Africa, which he reached 
only to die. 

Scipio had been prevented from making Africa the 
ostensible scene of his operations ; but he had the per- 
mission of his government to cross over there, *'if he 
held it to be for the interest of the state." He did 
hold it so to be ; and amidst the general enthusiasm 
of his troops, picked for the service, and the admira- 
tion of the crowds of provincials who thronged the 
shore, with all solemn pomp and magnificence, and the 
prayers to heaven which he knew so well how to use 
with effect, he set sail from Lilybseum. 

*' After this prayer, a sacrifice was offered, and he cast 
the raw entrails of the victim, according to custom, into the 



SCIPIO CROSSES TO AFRICA. 149 

sea, and bade tlie trumpet sound for weighing anclior. 
They set sail with a stiff breeze in their favour, and were 
soon carried out of sight of land. At mid-day a fog came 
on, so that the ships with difficulty escaped running foul of 
one another. When they were well out at sea the wind 
slackened. During the following night the haze continued, 
but when the sun rose it dispersed, and the wind got up 
again. They now sighted land ; and the pilot soon after- 
wards said to Scipio that they were not above five miles 
from the coast of Africa ; that he could see Mercury's 
Point ; *■ and that if he pleased to give orders to make for 
it, the whole fleet would be presently in harbour. When 
Scipio got sight of land, he prayed the gods that this his 
first view of Africa might be for his country's honour and 
his own : then bade the fleet spread sail and make for an- 
other landing-place lower down the coast. The wind was fair 
in that direction. But the fog, coming on about the same 
time as the day before, soon shut the land from sight, and 
as the fog grew thicker the wind dropped. Nightfall made 
their position difficult to ascertain ; they therefore cast 
anchor, for fear the vessels might foul each other or run 
ashore. When day broke, the breeze sprang up again, the 
fog dispersed, and discovered the whole coast of Africa. 
Scipio asked what the name of the nearest headland was : 
and when he learnt that it was called ' Fair Point,' f — ' I 
accept the omen,' said he ; ^ steer right for it.' For that 
point the fleet stood in, and there the whole force was 
landed."— (xxix. 27.) 

His success was rapid. He had been disappointed 
in Syphax as an ally ; but Massinissa, king of a Nu- 
midian tribe — a wily and treacherous barbarian, but an 
.able leader of irregular cavalry — had just been driven 

* Now Cape Bon. 

+ Pulchrum Promontorium ; now Cape Farina* 



150 LIVY. 

from his dominions by this very Syphax, and took 
advantage of it to transfer his services from Carthage 
to the Eomans, a step which he had long been medi- 
tating. Scipio had once laid him under obligation in 
Spain, and they had already been in correspondence. 
His cavalry was of the greatest use to the Eomans in 
their new campaign. The camps of the ^N'umidians and 
Carthaginians — mere wattled huts covered with thatch 
and dried leaves — were surprised and burnt; and in 
the massacre — for it could hardly be called a fight 
— which followed, 30,000 Carthaginians are said to 
have been kiUed, and the Ifumidian force of 60,000 
men was either cut to pieces or dispersed."^ Syphax 
was followed into I^umidia, defeated, and sent prisoner 
to Eome, and Massinissa regained his kingdom. 

It was not therefore before Hannibars presence was 
needed at home that he, like his brother Mago, was 
summoned home from Italy. But Hannibal himself, 
thus torn from the field of his conquests and his hopes 
— though it was only what he had for some time ex- 
pected — was not likely to take this view. 

" He is said to have groaned aloud and ground his teeth, 
and scarcely to have refrained from tears, as he listened to 
the message of the envoys. When they had delivered 
thsmselves of their instructions, ' Ay,' said he, ^ now they 
recall me in plain terms instead of by implication, — they 
who have so long been trying to drag me back by refusing 
me men or money. Hannibal is defeated — not by the 
Roman people, whom he has so often beaten and put to 

* ** The annals of war contain no bloodier tragedy." — 
Arnold. 



HANNIBAL QUITS ITALY. 151 

fliglit, but by tbe Cartbaginian government, tbeir jeab)usy 
and envy. Not Scipio bimself will boast and exult so 
much in this ignominious return of mine, as will Hanno, 
who seeks to effect the destruction of our house by the ruin 
of Carthage, since he can do it in no other way/ . . . 
Seldom was any man, leaving his native land for foreign 
exile, known to have parted from it with more evident 
sorrow than Hannibal showed in quitting the soil of an 
enemy. Often, as he looked back on the shores of Italy, 
he accused gods and men, and cursed himself and his folly, 
Hhat he had not led his troops straight to Eome while 
their swords were yet red from the victory of Cannae/ '' — 
(xxx. 20.) 

Scipio was closely blockading Utica, when envoys 
were seiit to him from Carthage to sue for peace. The 
terms wliich be is said to have offered them, and they 
to have accepted, amounted almost to submisaion. 
The Carthaginians were to evacuate Italy, Gaul, and 
Spain ; to cede to Eome all the islands which lay be- 
tween Italy and Africa ; to give up all their ships of 
war but twenty ; and to pay the Eomans a large in- 
demnity in corn and money. Hard as the terms were, 
they had to be referred to Eome for approval ; and a 
truce was agreed upon for this purpose. If we are to 
trust the Eoman annalist, the truce was broken by the 
Carthaginians, elated at the prospect of Hannibars re- 
turn. The whole story is apocryphal, as are the details 
of the meeting which Livy records as having taken place 
between Hannibal and the Eoman consul soon after 
his landing, — in which " both stood for a while silent, 
as though struck dumb by mutual admiration,' '*-'— 

* Book xxx., ch. 30. 



152 LIVY. 

and the story of the Carthaginian spies whom Scipio 
detected, and ordered to be led round his camp to 
see for themselves and report what they would to 
their chief. Whatever may have been the true his- 
tory of the negotiations for peace, they ended in 
nothing; and the tvro comroandors and their forces 
met on the field of Zama.* 

The fight was long and obstinate. The eighty 
elephants which were ranged in the front of the Car- 
thaginians, and on which they stiU placed great 
dependence, were left a free course to the Eoman 
rear, through openings in the line, by Scipio's skilful 
arrangement, and so did little execution, and even 
broke to the wings against their own cavalry. Mas- 
sinissa's horse did good service. Eut the deciding 
contest lay between the Eoman legionaries, picked 
men as they all were, and Hannibal's veterans, soldiers 
by profession and training, who had followed him over 
the Alps and through Italy. Neither would give way, 
until Lselius and Massinissa with the Eoman and ISlii- 
midian horse, returning from the brief pursuit of the 
enemy's cavalry, charged their infantry in the rear. 
Then the day was over : 20,000 of the Carthaginians 
are said to have been killed, and as many taken pri- 
soners. Scipio was advancing upon Carthage by sea, 
when a ship met him with a flag of truce. The terms 
he insisted on were even harder than before ; Carthage 
was now to retain only ten ships ; to pledge itself to 
engage in no war out of Africa itself, or even there with- 
out consent of the Eomans ; to maintain the Eoman 
* The real site of the battle is uncertain. 




TREATY OF PEACE. 153 

army in pay and rations for three months ; and to give 
a hundred hostages of the conqueror's selection. There 
was some hesitation in the Carthaginian senate as to 
their acceptance ; when Hannibal, who had escaped 
from the battle with a few horsemen, rose and spoke 
in favour of peace at any price. Peace was signed ; the 
great Punic War — or, as the Eomans justly called it, 
the war with Hannibal — was over ; and the career of 
one of the greatest generals — if not the very greatest 
— of any time or country, was ended at the early age 
of forty -five. He lived nearly twenty years after- 
wards ; but we shall find him soon banished from 
Carthage (where he had always jealous enemies), at 
the demand of the Eomans, and he never afterwards 
held any except a subordinate naval command under 
Aniiochas of Syria. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE ROMANS IX GREECE. 
(books XXX. -XXXIV. B.C. 200-194.) 

We have now arrived at the period in history when 
Eome comes into distinct contact with Greece. PhiKp 
V. of Macedon had made an alliance with Carthage, 
as we have seen, after Hannibal's great victory at 
Cannae; but the hostihties between him and theEomans 
had not been carried on very actively ; and the latter, 
fully occupied with Spain and Africa, had not been 
sorry- to make a truce with Philip, which had now 
lasted some years. 

But after the battle of Zama, appeals came in from 
more quarters than one for aid against the growing 
encroachments of PhilijD's ambition. One. of his 
generals was investing Athens ] his admirals at sea 
were endeavouring to make themselves masters of the 
^gean, by humbling the naval power of Ehodes and 
of Attains king of Pergamus, the old and faithful ally 
of Eome ; and all, in their difficulty, turned their eyes 
to Eome. The reply which the Eoman senate gave to 
the envoys from Ehodes and Pergamus was in a truly 
imperial tone : " The senate would see to the affairs of 



DEFEAT OF PHILIP. 155 

Asia." "Whether Philip heard of the ans^ver or no, he 
was a match for them in lofty words. He had made 
himself master of all the important coast towns of 
Thrace, and was investing Ahydos. The Eoman com- 
missioner who was sent to remonstrate with him was 
an ^Emilias, somewhat young for his office. He spoke 
as Philip had not been accustomed to hear. The 
Macedonian answered with some dignity : — 

" ' Your youth, sir,' said he, ' and your personal advan- 
tages, and more than all, your Eoman name, makes you 
use somewhat hold language. My deshe is, in the first 
place, that you would remember your treaty with me, and 
maintain the peace. If you trouble me ^ith war, I am 
prepared to make you feel that the Macedonian rule and 
the Macedonian name can wm as great renown in war as 
the Eoman.' "— (xxxi. 18.) 

With the exception of the Acarnanians and Boeotians, 
all the Greek states either joined the Eomans in the 
war against Philip or stood neutral. In B.C. 200, a 
Eoman consular army crossed from Brandusium to 
Apollonia in Epirus. It was unlike, in many respects, 
the armies of the Punic wars. The men were all 
nominally volunteers for the service (for a levy had 
been found too unpopular) ; and there were in the 
force a thousand Xumidian cavalry, and elephants 
brought from Carthage. 

The war lingered on without any great result for 
two years, until it was terminated by a great victory 
won over Philip at Cynocephala3 by Titus Flamininus, 
a young Eoman general of the new school, himself 
half a Greek in tastes and habits, but an energetic 



156 LIVY. 

and capable commander. The defeat was complete, 
and the Macedonian power was crushed. The phalanx 
once broken became a helpless mass of confusion ; and 
the elephants, which had already done the Eomans 
good service in these campaigns, contributed much to 
the victory. While the enemy lost 13,000 men in 
killed and prisoners, the Roman loss, according to 
Livy, was not more than 700. Philip was compelled 
to accept the terms which had been already offered by 
the Eomans. He had to surrender all his conquests 
in Asia, in Greece, and on the coasts of the iEgean, 
retaining only his ancestral kingdom of Macedonia ; to 
give up nearly all his fleet, to pay a large indemnity, 
and to become in matters of war and peace almost the 
vassal of Rome. 

Elamininus made what was almost a triumphal pro- 
gress through Greece to Corinth, to be present there 
at the great Isthmian games. His fancy was to pro- 
duce an effect which we should now call sensational. 
Ten commissioners had arrived from Rome with the 
ratification of the conditions of peace. 

" The Romans took their seats at the spectacle. Then 
the herald, with his trumpeter, according to custom, ad- 
vanced into the centre of the arena, where proclamation of 
the games is wont to be made in solemn form ; and when 
the trumpet had sounded for silence, spoke aloud as fol- 
lows : ' The senate and people of Rome, and Titus Quinc- 
tius their general, having conquered King Philip and the 
Macedonians, hereby pronounce free and independent, and 
subject only to their own laws, the Corinthians, Phocians, 
and all the Locrians ; the island of Euboea, the Magnesians, 
the ThessalianS; the Perrhsebians, and the Achaeans of 



FLAJflXISUS AT CORIXTR. 157 

Phthioti?.' He had recited all the states hitherto subject 
to King Philip. When the herald's words ireie heaid, the 
joy was too great for the hearers to take it in all at once. 
Each conld scarce believe he had heard aright ; men looked 
at each other in amazement, as though it were all an empty 
dre<mi. They questioned their neighbours as to the points 
in the proclamation which concerned themselves, mistrust- 
ing their own ears. The herald was recalled ; every one 
wanted not only to hear but see this messenger of liberty: 
he repeated the words again. Then, when the joyful tidings 
were confirmed, there rose such a clamour of cheers, and 
clapping of hands, and so often lepeated, as to show that 
of all blessings none is so dear to the masses as liberty. 
The games were then hurried through, for none had either 
thought or eyes for the show ; so entirely did that one 
great joy preoccupy their minds, that they had no sense of 
other pleasures. When the games were over, all pressed 
hurriedly to where the Eoman general sat ; insomuch thaf^ 
owing to the rush of the crowd to get near his person, eager 
to grasp his hand, and throwing wreaths and ribbon-knots 
upon him, he was almost in personal danger. However, he 
was a young man of three-and-thirty ; and the vigour of 
youth, as well as his gratification in this realisation of his 
glories, gave hini strength. Nor did this effusion of uni- 
versal joy last only for the moment : it was revived for 
many days in men's thoughts and conversation. 'There 
was then one nation on earth which, at its own cost, its 
own toil and peril, would wage war for the liberties of 
others ; and this it did not merely for contiguous or near 
neighbours, or peoples inhabiting the same continent ; it 
woiiid cross the seas, in order that there should be no 
unjust dominion throughout all the world, but that every- 
where justice, law, and ri^ht should bear rule. By a single 
herald's voice, all the cities of Greece and Asia had been 
made firee. To have conceived the hope of this, betokened 
a daring spirit ; to have carried it into effect, showed equal 
valoiu: and good fortune.' " — (xxxiii. 32, 33 



158 Livr. 

One is tempted to ask, did riamininiis write liis 
own bulletins of the war'? But that he was a great 
favourite with the Greeks, and that he had a great 
admiration for many of their habits and tastes, seems 
certain. He would have conferred a more real freedom 
on Sparta if he had effectually delivered it from the 
domination of its tyrant ^abis, who had originally 
espoused the cause of Philip, but of whom the Eo- 
mans had unscrupulously made a friend for their own 
purposes, until the continual complaints of his neigh- 
bours induced them to direct Flamininus to deal with 
him as he thought fit. He reduced him to something 
like quiet ; and at the great ^Nemean games held at 
Argos under the presidency of the Koman general, a 
very similar scene took place to that at the Isthmus 
a year before. The *^ freedom " of Argos from the op- 
pression of Nabis, into whose hands Philip had for his 
own purposes surrendered it, was solemnly announced, 
and again the Eoman was hailed as the great liberator. 
When at the expiration of his prolonged command 
he took his leave of Greece at Corinth, he gave them 
the excellent advice which Greeks, then or since, have 
never been inclined to take. He ended his speech 
in these words : — 

" Let their leaders^ and the different ranks in each state, 
and the states amongst one another, strive for union and 
concord. So long as they were at one, neither king nor 
tyrant could be strong enough to harm them. Disunion 
and distrust gave every opportunity to watchful eneniie>^. 
For the party which is worsted in an intestine quarrel will 
rather apply for help to foreign powers than yield to their 
own countrymen. He exhorted them to guard and main- 



TRIUMPH OF FLAMIXIXUS. 159 

tain by their o^^vn exertions fhe lilDerty piircliased h\ the 
arms of others, and restored to them bv the good faith of 
strangers ; that so the Eoman people might feel that thev 
had given freedom to men who were worthy of it, and that 
their service had been well bestowed." — (xxxiv. 49.) 

They parted from him, says the chronicler, with 
tears, as children from a parent; and he was himself 
so affected as to be scarcely able to conclude his speech. 
Before he left, he procured from their gratitude the 
redemption from their present masters of a number of 
those unfortunate Eomans who had been sold as slaves 
into Greece during the Punic wars, when the stern 
sentence of their countrymen had refused to pay their 
ransom.* Twelve hundred of them were found in 
Achaia alone. "Judge, then," says the historian, 
" how many, in that proportion, there were likely to 
have been in all Greece." His triumph at Eome lasted 
three days. It was magnificent with the worhs of 
Greek art which had been captured, chiefly from Philip ; 
the golden crowns presented to the liberator by the 
several states — one hundred and fourteen ; the captive 
princes and noble hostages, among them Demetrius, 
the young son of Philip, and Armenes, son of the 
tyrant Kabis : but the grandest feature in the show 
(Livy evidently has the good taste to think so) was 
the band of liberated Eomans, who, with their heads 
shaven, in token of recovered freedom, followed the 
triumphant procession of their deliverer up the hill of 
the Capitol. 

♦ See p. 129, 



CHAPTER XL 

THE ROMANS IN ASIA. 
(books xxxy. -XXXIX. B.C. 193-183.) 

I^Iagedon had been humbled, and Eome was at liberty 
to turn her arms elsewhere. Antiochus of Syria, 
known as the Great, had for some time been extending 
his conquests on the coasts of Asia Minor, chiefly at 
the expense of the recognised dominions of the kings 
of Egypt. Tliere was, in fact, an understanding be- 
tween him and Philip that they were to divide Egypt 
between them. The present Ptolemy was a mere child ; 
and the Komans, no doubt with their own objects in 
view, had lately taken him under their '^ protection." 
If Antiochus had anticipated their action by joining 
Philip before the fortunes of Macedon were ruined, 
events might very possibly Lave taken a different turn 
in the future ; as it was, he had spirit enough to re- 
fuse the demand of Rome that he should restore his 
conquests from Ptolemy, but not enough strength to 
maintain his resistance. When he crossed into Greece 
on the invitation of the ^tolians, who had never 
acquiesced in the Eoman policy, he found Philip of 
Macedon deaf to all proposals of an alliance against 



BATTLE OF MA GNESIA, 161 

Eome as a common enemy — an alliance whicli was 
offered too late — and dutifully siding with his new 
allies and masters against him. In vain Antiochus 
tried to make a stand at the old historic pass of 
Thermopylae : he had to retire defeated from Greece, 
only to be followed into Asia, as Hannibal had warned 
him, by the unrelaxing grasp of Eome, "already af- 
fecting the empire of the world ; " to be finally con- 
quered at Magnesia, in the passes of Mount Sipylus, 
and reduced to accept humiliating terms, by another 
of the great family of the Scipios, Lucius Cornelius, 
known from these campaigns as " Asiaticus " — the first 
Roman commander who landed a hostile force in Asia. 
The battle which sealed the fate of Syria was fought, 
however, by his lieutenants, while Scipio lay ill in 
his tent. Again, as with the Carthaginians at Zama, 
the elephants brought into action by the Syrians 
turned on their own ranks and broke their formation, 
and their loss at Magnesia is estimated at 50,000 men. 

This war with Antiochus introduces us once more 
to the hero of the Punic wars. The faction at 
Carthage which had always been opposed to Hannibal 
and his policy now denounced him to the Romans as 
engaged in negotiations with Antiochus. They at 
once sent to Carthage to complain, no doubt intending 
to demand his extradition. One man at Eome, to his 
great honour, protested against the course taken : it 
was Scipio, Hannibal's old antagonist, who best knew 
his worth. He said it was " unworthy of the dignity of 
the Eoman people to listen to party accusations against 
Buch a man." Hannibal did not wait the result : he 

A.C.S.S., vol i. L 



162 Livr. 

fled at once to the court of Antiocliiis, Avhich seems to 
imply that the report of his intentions was not with- 
out foundation. He was warmly received ; but he 
could not persuade the Syrian to adopt his own 
vigorous policy, and carry the war at once into Italy 
rather than await the Romans in Greece. Antiochus 
gave him a naval command, for which he was pro- 
bably unsuited, and in which he was unsuccessful. 

A passage which our annalist quotes from an earlier 
Eoman historian, Claudius Quadrigarius * (to whom, 
however, he never seems to give much credit as an au- 
thority), describes a singular interview as having taken 
place about this time between Hannibal and Scipio 
Africanus. The latter was, according to Claudius, 
one of the envoys sent from Rome to Antiochus. He 
and Hannibal met at Ephesus, where they had a con- 
versation which Claudius thus recorded : — 

" Scipio asked Hannibal, whom he held to be the great- 
est general ? He replied, ' Alexander, king of Macedon ; 
because he defeated enormous armies with a small force, 
and had traversed the remotest regions, which few men 
could hope even to get a sight of.' When he was asked 
whom he would place second, he said, * Pyrrhus ; he had 
first taught the laying out a camp : and besides this, no 
man ever showed better judgment in choosing his ground 
and placing his outposts. He had also such tact in winning 
men to himself, that the nations of Italy preferred to be 
governed by a foreign ruler, rather than by the Roman 
people who had stood at their head so long.' When he was 
pressed further as to whom he considered to be third, he 

* He wrote about B.C. 100. We have only some scattered 
fragments of liis history. 



DEATH OF HAXXIBAL, 163 

replied, ^ Hiiaself, unquestionably/ Then Scipio laughed, 
and said, ' What would you have said if you had conquered 
me / ' ^ In that case,' he replied, ' I should have stood be- 
fore Alexander^ and before Pyrrhus, and all other com- 
manders.' The Punic astuteness displayed in the answer, 
and the unexpected turn of the compliment, gratified Scipio 
highly, as though Hannibal had purposely omitted him 
from the list of generals, as not admitting of comparison 
with them." — (xxxy. 14.) 

One article in the peace made with. Antiochus was 
a disgrace to the Eoman name. It was stipulated 
(though Livy does not mention the fact) that he 
should surrender Hannibal to his implacable enemies. 
Their victim escaped, and took refuge with Prusias, 
king of Bithynia. Thither also Eoman vengeance 
followed him in the person of Flamininus, who was 
determined to rid Rome of him by any means. Han- 
nibal anticipated the treachery of his host, who had 
stationed soldiers at the doors of his lodging. 

*^ He had always anticipated some such end to his life : 
both because he knew the unrelenting hatred the Eomans 
bore him, and because he had little faith in the honour of 
princes. . . , He asked a slave for the poison wliich 
he had for some time kept ready for such an emergency. 
' Let us free Eome from this anxiety/ said he, ^ since 
they think it long to wait for an old man's death. The 
triumph which Flamininus will win over an unarmed and 
aged man is neither great nor glorious. Yerily, this moment 
bears witness that the character of the Eoman people has 
somewhat changed. Their fathers, when King Pyrrhus, 
an armed enemy, lay camped in Italy, forewai^ned him to 
beware of poison. These present men have sent one of 
their consulars on such an errand as this, — to urge Piusiaa 



164 Livr. 

to the base murder of his guest.' Then^ launching execra- 
tions against Prusias and his kingdom, and calling on the 
gods to witness his breach of faith and hospitality, he 
swallowed the draught. Such was the end of Hamiibal." 
— (xxxix. 52.) 

The Eoman historian, writing what was deliberately 
intended as a chronicle of Eome's greatness, could not 
well speak more plainly of her behaviour to her great 
antagonist. The man who, spite of all his intensely 
Eoman feeling, is catholic in his admiration of all 
that is noble, and scorn of what is mean and base — 
and this is Livy's great praise — could find it in his 
conscience to say no less. Without excusing it, with- 
out openly reproving it, except through the mouth of 
the Carthaginian, he drops the veil over this blotted 
page in the history of his country. 

In the very same year, B.C. 183, there died at Eome 
Hannibal's great antagonist — it is hard to say his con- 
queror — Scipio ^' of Africa." There was a set made 
against the house of the Scipios, the motives of which, 
and its justice or injustice, would require a history of 
Eoman political factions to explain. The hero of Zama 
was accused, TVTongfully or otherwise, of peculation 
and embezzlement during his years of co.mmand. He 
met the charge with scorn ; called for his account- 
books, it was said, and indignantly tore them up in 
the face of his accusers. 

^^ When called upon for his defence, he strode through 
the crowd up to the Eostra, escorted by a large body of 
personal friends and dependants ; and when he had obtained 
silence, he said — ' This is the day, tribunes and people of 



IMPEACHMENT OF THE SCIPI03, 165 

Eome, on which I fought Hannibal and the Carthaginians 
in a great battle with happy and successful result. Where- 
fore, since to-day it is but right to pause from strife and 
quarrel, I shall go hence straight to the Capitol, to do rev- 
erence to Jupiter, best and greatest, to Juno and Minerva, 
and all the other powers who guard our citadel : and I shall 
give them thanks that on this day, and on many a day be- 
sides, they bestowed on me the spirit and the power to serve 
the state. Do you, Eomans, all who conveniently may, go 
with me, and pray the gods that you may ever have leaders 
like unto me ; since, as from my seventeenth year to my 
old age your award of honours was ever in advance of my 
years, so no honour was ever paid me by you that I had 
not first earned by good service.' From the Eostra he 
moved on to the Capitol. At once the whole assemblage 
turned and followed him, until at last even the clerks and 
bailiffs deserted the magistrates, and not a man was left 
with them but a mob of slaves, and the crier of the court 
who summoned defendants. Accompanied by the people, 
he visited all the temples not only in the Capitol, but 
throughout the city. That day the popularity of Scipio 
rose almost higher, and his real greatness was more strongly 
felt, than when he rode through the city at his triumph 
over Syphax and the Carthaginians." — (xxxviii. 52.) 

But, as Livy puts it, " that day was the last bright 
one that dawned for Publius Scipio." His enemies 
still insisted on bis being brought to trial, and he as 
steadily refused to meet them. One of the tribunes, 
Tiberius Gracchus, though a personal enemy, would 
not join his colleagues in tbe act of impeachment. 

*' Shall the man who tamed Africa be trampled on by 
yon ? Was it for this he routed and overthrew four of the 
best generals of Carthage and four of her armies in Spain ] 
for this that he took Syphax prisoner, conquered Hanni- 



1G6 Livr. 

bal, made Cartilage our vassal, drove Antiochiis beyond 
the Taurus (for Ids brother Lucius admitted him to- a share 
in this glory) — to fall a victim here to you two Petillii — 
that you should win renown for yourselves on Scipio ] 
Shall no services of his own, no honours bestowed by you, 
ever make the retirement of a hero safe — nay, sacred — in 
your eyes ? The old age of such men, if it cannot com- 
mand your veneration, should surely claim your forbear- 
ance." — (xxxviii. 53.) 

Even the accusers, we are told, were moved by 
these noble words, and the senate thanked the speaker 
*Hhat he had sacrificed his private enmity to his 
public duty." The prosecution was dropped. 

" From that time men spoke no more of Africanus. He 
spent the rest of his life at Liternum,"^ without a regret for 
Eome. They say that when dying he gave instructions 
that he should be buried there, and a monument there 
raised to him, that his last obsequies should not take place 
amongst liis ungrateful fellow-citizens. A man worthy of 
all memory, yet rather from his conduct in war than in 
peace." — (xxx\dii. 53.) 

The enemies of the house were not satisfied without 
the impeachment of his brother, Lucius '*of Asia." 
Tlie charge brought against him was that of receiving 
bribes from Antiochus to grant him too favourable 
conditions of peace. He also is represented as meeting 
the accusation with a lofty contempt. But he v/as 
condemned, and his property confiscated to pay the 

* Now ToiTe di Patria. The word '^ Patria " seems to cor- 
roborate the story of Scipio having made it his *' country" 
instead of Rome. 



INCREASE OF LUXURY. 167 

claims made upon him. He was even imprisoned for 
a while, but soon set at liberty. 

The case of the Scipios is only one of many indica- 
tions in the author's pages that there was springing 
up at Eome an oligarchy of wealth, of a character very 
different from that of the old patrician nobility of 
earlier and simpler times. E-ome had not only enlarged 
her boundaries by her conquests ; she had opened a 
field in which her successful generals could enrich 
themselves and their families. The " grave and 
severe " life which had been the pride of the Eoman 
was fast decaying : he was beginning to learn, from 
Greece and from the East, the lessons of self-indulgence 
and luxury. A pernicious effect is said to have been 
produced by the triumph of Manlius Yulso, in honour 
of his defeat of the Asiatic Gauls (the Gallo-Graeci, or 
Galatians) in the year following the defeat of Antio- 
chus. The display of wealth in his procession was 
such as had never yet been seen at Eome. '^ Two 
hundred golden crowns," and silver and gold in every 
form, coined and uncoined, made part of his show, and 
he distributed ostentatious largesses on the occasion 
to his soldiery. He was accused of having tolerated 
brigandage and licentiousness of every kind amongst 
them while in the East : and, in fact, he had delayed 
for some time his demand for a triumph, in fear of 
public impeachment. 

" The taint of foreign luxury was imported into the city 
by the return of the army from Asia. They first introduced 
into Eome couches of gilded bronze, costly tapestry, hang- 
ings, and other textile fabrics ; and^ what was then con- 



168 Livr. 

sidered extravagant in furniture, claw- tables and brackets. 
Then first female harpists and tambourine-players, and the 
jests of professional buffoons, came into fashion at enter- 
tainments : the entertainments themselves were given with 
more care and cost. The cook — who in old times was one 
of the lowest of the slaves in value and in importance — 
began to rise in price ; and what had been a mere servile 
office came to be considered a profession. Yet what was 
seen then were only the germs of that luxury which was 
soon to spring up." — (xxxix. 6.) 

One powerful voice was heard declaiming from time 
to time against this growing corruption of morals. 
Marcus Fortius Cato, whether as praetor, consul, or 
censor, never ceased to urge a return to the old simpler 
life of Eome — with little effect. It is Livy's voice, 
too, as well as Cato's, which we hear in that long and 
vigorous declamation against the repeal of the Oppian 
sumptuary law, meant to repress the extravagances of 
women. * But while he rebukes the one sex for their 
display in dress and equipages, he does not spare the 
other : while he tells the women that " she who begins 
to be ashamed of what she ought not to be ashamed 
of, will soon begin not to be ashamed of what she 
ought;" — he warns the men against ^* the two great 
and opposite vices under which Eome was suffering 
— avarice and luxury, which are the ruin of all great 
commonwealths ;" he tells them that *' of all kinds of 
shame, the worst is the being ashamed of frugality 
and poverty;" and he deplores the day when works of 
art came in from Syracuse to outshine 'Hhe earthen 

* Book xxxiv. eh. 2. 



I 



FOPVLAR SUFJSnSTITIOXS. 169 

images "of their Koman gods,'* and royal treasures 
found their way to Eome from Greece and Asia, 
which made his countrymen ^^ rather captives than 
captors.'* 

Cato did not speak without reason of the influence 
of " foreign superstitions " on the female mind at 
Eome. Addiction to sorcery, to incantations, to un- 
hallowed orgies, and even to secret poisoning, was a 
charge brought from time to time against Eoman 
matrons ; and though in all probability exaggerated by 
panic, as all such charges commonly are, it must have 
rested on some ground of truth. There had been one 
of these panics at the termination of the Latin War 
(b.c. 335), which was, according to Livy, the first. time 
such practices were discovered at Eome.* The account 
reads very much like one of the modern epidemics of 
witchcraft in our own country or in jSTew England. 
Twenty matrons are first accused and apprehended on 
the evidence of a maid-servant ; they in turn give in- 
formation against others ; and a hundred and twenty 
are at last convicted and put to death. But in the years 
which followed the Eoman victories in Greece and Asia, 
the panic and the consequent proceedings were of a far 
more terrible nature. The worship of Cybele, with all 
its abominable rites, had been introduced from Asia, 
in compliance with popular demand, in the last years 
of the war with Hannibal, because an old prophecy had 
been found — or was said to have been found — in the 
Sibylline books, that " when a foreign enemy should 
* Book viii. ch. 18. 



170 Livr. 

carry war into Italy, he should be conquered and ex- 
pelled, if tlie Mother of the Gods were carried to 
Rome." She had been brought accordingly, in solemn 
state, from Pessinus in Phrygia — a rough stone, which 
the native priests warranted to be the veritable Mother 
— which young Publius Scipio, the popular favourite, 
as '^ the most blameless man in the state," was com- 
missioned to escort. It had been received by a depu- 
tation of matrons of noble birth, and set up in the 
temple of Victory. Chaldaean astrologers were natural- 
ised in the city, and largely consulted. Certain rites 
connected with the worship of Bacchus had also been 
introduced by an Etrurian priest, which led to the 
vilest excesses. The measures taken by the authorities 
to cut out the cancer from the national life of Eome 
certainly did not err on the side of leniency. Two 
hundred women were convicted of poisoning their 
husbands : " seven thousand of both sexes " w^ere con- 
demned, most of them probably to death, as members 
of a secret association of the worst description ;* and 
a few years afterwards, three thousand more were con 
demned for similar practices, and the wife of the con- 
sul Piso was executed for poisoning her husband. 
But when we read that the public authorities '' offered 
a reward to any informer who should bring any of the 
guilty parties before them, or denounce any one in his 
absence," — that " a panic seized the whole senate " — 
that so many fled in terror from the city as almost to 
put a stop to public business — that many of those who 
* B.C. 186. Book xxxix, eh. 17. 



CONSEQUENT PANIC. 171 

were accused committed suicide at once — and that the 
prisoners, " when brought before the consuls, all con- 
fessed their guilt, and did not give them the trouble 
of a trial,*' — no one who has read the history of such 
scenes, even in times which are considered more 
enlightened, can doubt but that here also the innocent 
suffered in greater numbers than the guilty. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE FALL OF MACEDON. 
(books XXXIX.-XLV. B.C. 190-167.) 

Philip of Macedon had succumbed to the Eoman 
arms ; but he was neither humbled by his defeat nor 
satisfied with the terms of peace. Though the Komans 
had taken nothing for themselves, they had taken 
nearly everything from him. They had " freed '* all 
the smaller states and towns which had so long looked 
to Philip as their lord and master, and had materially 
increased the domains of the kings of Pergamus, and 
thus raised to importance by the side of Macedon 
a rival of whom he had always been jealous. Besides 
this, Philip found himself now somewhat in the case 
of the wounded lion with whom all the meaner beasts 
take liberties in his distress. Towns over which he 
understood his rights to have been reserved repudiated 
his allegiance : disputes arose between him and his 
neighbours, and in every case the appeal was to Eome 
as the general referee and public '' liberator." Livy 
puts the state of the case shrewdly enough : — 

"The moment the idea spread amongst the different 
states which bordered on Macedonia that accusations and 



I 



PHILIP OF MACEDON. 173 

complaints against Philip were Hstened to by the Eomans 
with attention, a great many found it worth their while to 
complain. Each town and tribe on their o^ti particular 
account, and even individuals in their own private interest 
(for all found the Macedonian a dangerous neighbour), came 
to Rome either in the hope of getting their grievances re- 
dressed, or at least to draw some solace from complaining 
of them." — (xxxix. 46.) 

It is easy to imagine how intolerable such a state of 
things must have become to a prince of Philip's tem- 
perament, and who had recently held such a different 
position. Eoman commissioners went here and there 
about Greece, hearing complaints and making inquiries, 
which, however honestly meant, must have chafed 
and humiliated the Macedonian beyond endurance. 
One of these commissions was held at Tempe in Thes- 
saly, where the deputies of various aggrieved communi- 
ties appeared, says the annalist, '' in the unmistakable 
guise of accusers,'* while Philip sat there "like a pri- 
soner on trial," before the high and mighty represent- 
atives of Kome. The dispute between him and the 
Thessalians, however important to them, has little 
interest now for us : the Eoman commissioners post- 
poned their decision ; but Philip saw, or thought he 
saw, that he should get scant justice from such a 
court, and that the Eomans were determined to crush 
him entirely. Their policy and his were in fact in- 
compatible. He took his resolution, and made his 
preparations in quiet ; but in order to gain time, he 
sent his younger son Demetrius to Eome, to try to 
make his peace there for the present. Demetrius, it 
will be remembered, had been given up by his father 



174 LIVY, 

as a hostage to the Eomans, and after figuring in the 
train of Fiamininus at his triumph, had spent some 
time in the city in a sort of honourable safe custody. 
He seems to have won the esteem of his hosts — pos- 
sibly had adopted some Eoman tastes and habits ; at 
any rate, the Eoman senate treated him with the 
greatest courtesy, assured him of their desire to do 
justice to all, and begged him to let his father under- 
stand '^ that all questions between him and the 
Eoman people might be considered settled, owing to 
the good offices of his son." 

The message was fatal to the young prince. His 
elder brother Perseus, jealous at finding the popularity 
of Demetrius greater than his own, slandered him to 
his father as being a Eoman at heart, and a traitor to 
the interests of Philip and Macedon. " The Eomans, 
no doubt, intended to raise their protege to the throne : 
would Macedonia accept a king from the hands of 
Eome ] " He even accused Demetrius of designing his 
father's murder. Philip listened too easily, and con- 
sented to his being put to death. From that moment 
he never knew a happy hour. He died two years 
afterwards, — chiefly, as the annalist thinks, *' of regret 
for his lost son, and remorse for his own cruelty : '* 
for the innocence of Demetrius was established when 
too late. 

** The seeds of the new war with Eome were sown," 
says Livy, " b}'' Philip. They bore their fruit under 
his successor Perseus, — a prince with many vigorous 
qualities, but lacking the genius of his father. The 
Eoman senate, at his request, acknowledged him as 



PREPARATIOyS OF PERSEUS. 175 

king and '^ their good friend," with diplomatic polite- 
ness ; but they mistrusted him from the first. He 
took an early opportunity of opening negotiations with 
their old enemies of Carthage. A mysterious embassy 
from him (of which it may be presumed very little 
was known, since Livy dismisses it in two lines) Avas 
said to have been admitted to an audience by the 
Carthaginian senate "at night, in the temple of 
^sculapius ; " but it does not appear to have had any 
result. He took pains to win the affections of the 
various Greek states, and held a kind of review of 
the Macedonian army in the sacred neighbourhood of 
Delphi — the point where Greek religious tradition 
and national reverence centred. Rome, on her part, 
was renewing her alliance with young Ptolemy of 
Egypt, and receiving graciously assurances of goodwill, 
and apologies for being somewhat dilatory in paying 
his tribute, from Antiochus of Syria, surnamed Epi- 
phanes — " the Brilliant" — son of their late antagonist. 
He too had been a hostage at Eome, and had con- 
ceived a respect for Eoman character, or at least for 
Roman power, and was glad to be on the side of the 
strongest in the coming issue. Eumenes of Pergamus 
came in person to Rome, and warned the senate there 
of the preparations — corn, money, foreign mercenaries 
in addition to the national force of Macedonia — which 
Perseus was getting together in prospect of the coming 
struggle. Eumenes even hinted, according to Livy's 
version of his oration, at a possible invasion of Italy. 
Perseus also had his envoys at Rome ; and the an- 
nalist, intentionally or otherwise, puts into the mouth 



176 Livr, 

of their spokesman a reply which, would §how that 
there was a true imperial spirit in these Macedonian 
kings. 

" His sovereign, he said, was desirous — nay, most anxious 
— that they should give credit to his assertion,, in answer to 
such charges, that he had shown no hostility to Eome in 
word or deed ; hut, if he saw them determinedly hent on 
finding some pretext for war, he could take his own part 
with firmness and spirit. War was a game open to all, and 
the result of an appeal to arms was what no man could 
foreteU."— (xlii. 14.) 

There was a barbaric grandeur in the answer, given 
in such a presence ; but if the account before us be 
true, the king was equally barbaric in his readiness to 
commit any kind of political murder. He tried to have 
Eumenes assassinated while sacrificing at Delphi, and 
very nearly succeeded. He next made an attempt to 
get the Roman ambassador in Greece poisoned in his 
apartments ; and the discovery, real or pretended, of 
this attempt, seems to have filled up the cup of his 
iniquities in the eyes of Eome. Envoys were sent to 
demand satisfaction, and Perseus received and dis- 
missed them, it was alleged, with a studied contempt, 
and even violent language, not according them even 
the ordinary hospitalities due to their office. War 
was resolved upon, and the preparations for it were on 
a scale commensurate with its importance; for the 
resources of Macedonia under Perseus were probably 
double what they had been under his father Philip. 
The Third Macedonian War, as it is commonly called, 
has scarcely been allowed its due weight in history. 



WAR WITH PERSEUS. 177 

Had Macedonia been supported, as Perseus hoped to 
have been, by the Asiatic princes, or by the states of 
Greece, the E^mans might have been driven back 
upon Italy. But even the ** royal marriages " on 
which Perseus had built his hopes — giving his sister 
to Prusias of Eithynia, and himself taking to wife 
a daughter of Seleucus (Philopator) of Syria — failed 
to afford him the su})port oh which he calculated. 
Prusias — that wretched time-server who had lent him- 
self to the assassination of Hannibal — looked on and 
waited the event ; Seleucus was dead ; and his brother 
and successor, Aatiochus " the Brilliant," cared for his 
own interests, and not those of Macedonia, and was 
ready to take advantage of the Romans being occupied 
elsewhere to lay his haiids on Egypt, 

Perseus stood almost alone against Eome ; Cotys, 
chief of the Odrysians, and ruler of all Eastern Thrace, 
furnished him with some of the best cavalry of the 
age, who did him good and gallant service ; but, with 
this exception, and a small liiyrian contingent, Mace- 
donia had to fight single-handed. 

Livy notes some signiiicaut incidents in the enrol- 
ment at Rome of soldiers for the campaign. Much 
is implied in the apparently casual statement that 
**many veteran centurions and soldiers volunteered 
for the service, because they saw that men who had 
served in the former Macedonian war, or against 
Antiochus in Syria, had come Jwme ricJi"^ The 
Roman legionary was no longer serving only for 
patriotism or for glory. Others protested against 
* Book xlii. ch. 52. 

A.C.S.S.. vol. i. M 



178 Livr. 

being called upon to serve again when past the nsnal 
age, and asserted the right which was claimed, and ap- 
pears to have been conceded, during the Samnite wars,* 
but which, like other popular rights, seems to have 
fallen into practical abeyance, of not being required to 
serve in an inferior rank to that which they held in 
their last campaign. The hard service which a Eoman 
soldier sometimes went through is strikingly set forth 
in the protest of an old officer, one Spurius Ligustinus. 
It gives us also a little glimpse into the domestic life, 
of which the pages of the annalist, to our great loss, 
supply so little illustration. The simple gossip of the 
veteran's story has more interest for us moderns than 
the intrigues of Greeks and Asiatics, and the " little 
wars " of Eome with the various tribes of Spain and 
Gaul, which take up so much of these later Annals. 
He was of the old Sabine stock — the muscle and 
sinews of the Eoman commonwealth. 

** I am a Sabine, from Crustmnina. My father left me 
some acres of land, and a Uttle cottage, in which I was born 
and brought up, and there I live to this day. As soon as 
I was old enough, my father gave me for a wife his brother'fc 
daughter, who brought with her no dowry beyond hei 
free birth and her modesty, and a fruitfulness which mighi 
have contented a far richer establishment. Six sons wc 
have, and two daughters — both married. Four of my son 
are grown to manhood, two are still youths. I first enterec 
the service twenty-nine years ago. I served as a privat 
Boldier for two years against King Philip, in the arm; 
which first landed in Macedonia ; in the third yea 
Quinctius Flamininus gave me the command of the tent] 

* See p. 87. . 



\ SPURIUS LIGUSTINUS. .. 179 

company of Hastati, as a reward for good service. When 
we bad beaten Philip and the Macedonians, and were 
brought home and disbanded, I volunteered again at once, 
and went with Marcus Porcius (Cato) into Spain. That 
no commander living was a keener observer and judge of 
a soldier's merit, is what all know who have served for 
any time under him and other generals. He selected me 
to command the first company of Hastati. A third time 
I volunteered into the army that was sent against the 
uEtolians and Antiochus ; I was given by Acilius the first 
company of Principes."^ When Antiochus was repulsed^ 
and the ^tolians reduced, we were brouglit back to Italy. 
Then I served two years in the annual levies. Then I 
made two campaigns in Spain. I was brought home by 
riaccus amongst others whom he selected for distinguished 
services to attend his triumph : at the request of the prsetor 
Gracchus, I went with him into his province. Four times 
within a few years I was made senior regimental ofiicer ; 
four-and- thirty times I have received good-service rewards 
from my commanding officers ; I have won six civic crowns 
for saving comrades^ lives ; I have served twenty-two years 
in the army, and I am above fifty years old. Even if I had 
not yet served my full time, and if my age did not entitle 
me to exemption, still, seeing that I can give you four 
soldiers in place of one, consul and fellow-citizens, I might 
fairly ask for my discharge. But I wish you to understand 
that what I have said is simply to do myself justice : for 
my part, as long as any one who has the levying of troops 
thinks me fit to fight, I am never going to excuse myself. 
The chiefs may give me what rank they think I deserve, 
— they have the ordering of that. I shall do my best that 
no one in the army ranks before me in doing his duty — as 
I always have done ; and that my commanding officers and 
all who have served with me can witness.^' — (xlii. 34.) 

* These were gradual steps in rank : the last was the chief 
centurion. 



180 Livr. 

He ended by begging bis fellow - soldiers not to 
stand upon tbeir strict privileges, but take service at 
once. He was introduced into tbe senate, and re- 
ceived a vote of tbanks ; and was at once appointed 
to one of the highest regimental commands. 

Perseus, we are told, was surprised, or affected so 
to be, at the prompt measures taken by the Eomans. 
He sent to offer satisfaction for any complaints which 
could be shown to be well grounded. The haughty 
reply of tlie senate was that Licinius the consul would 
shortly be in Macedonia with his army, and the king 
could explain himself to him. He tried further 
negotiations ; but the final result was that his envoys 
were ordered " to quit Eome at once, and Italy within 
thirty days." 

The war lasted four years. In the first campaign 
the Romans had an incompetent commander in the 
consul Licinius, and the splendid Thracian cavalry 
were irresistible in their sweeping charges. The Eo- 
mans were defeated in a great battle, and Perseus 
gladly took the opportunity of offering to make peace 
on the terms that had been conceded to his father 
Philip. But the Eomans had the merit (or, as Dr 
Arnold seems to thinks it, the fault*) of never con- 
fessing a defeat. They refused to listen to the ad- 
vances of Perseus, and the war went on ; still, on the 
side of Eome, under generals more or less unequal to 
their work, until Paulas ^milius, son of the consul 
who had died so gallantly at Cannae, was elected the 
second time to the consulship, B.C. 168. Above sixty 
* Hist, of Rom. Comm. i. 15. 



BATTLE OF PYDNA. 181 

years old, but liale and vigorous, lie was a strict dis- 
ciplinarian, and as judicious as he was brave. He 
concluded the war in a few months, by the great vic- 
tory of Pydna. The description given of the veteran 
general in the battle is, unfortunately, one of the many 
mutilated passages in this imperfect Decade, and lias 
been filled in by a later and inferior hand. AVhen he 
saw his vanguard giving way, as they did before the 
first onset of the Macedonian phalanx, " he tore his 
cloak in sheer indignation." The sight of the old 
man rushing into the fight and exposing himself like 
the youngest officer, recalled the men to their duty. 
It was a desperate and doubtful fight, though of short 
duration ; but, the phalanx once broken, the Eoman 
victory was complete. An hour was enough to decide 
the fate of Macedonia. 20,000 of the Macedonians 
were left dead on the field : Livy would have us 
believe that the Romans only lost 100 men. They 
made 11,000 prisonei-s. The Macedonian and Thracian 
cavalry left the field almost without striking a blow. 
They escorted the king, who is said to have been the 
first to fly, to Amphipolis ; and in two days all ]\Iace- 
donia was at the feet of the Eomans. Perseus was 
pursued to Samothrace, and there taken prisoner, and 
led captive, with his two young sons, before the con- 
sul's chariot in his triumph at Eome. 

" It was not only Perseus who just then presented an in- 
stance of the mutability of human fortunes, led in chains 
before the chariot of his conqueror through the capital of 
his enemies ; but even the conqueror Paulus, in all the 
glory of his purple and gold. Of the two sons whom he had 



182 LIVT. 

kept at home (he liad parted with the others, to be adopted), 
the sole remaining heirs of his name, his fortunes, and his 
house, the younger, twelve years old, died five days before 
the triumph ; the elder, of fourteen, four days afterwards : 
boys who might have hoped to have ridden in their father's 
chariot in their robes of honour, anticipating similar tri- 
umphs for themselves." — (xlv. 40.) 

Paulus himself is made to refer touchingly to this 
bereavement in his public speech a few days after- 
wards, alluding to that jealousy of the Higher Powers 
which was held, in the Eoman creed almost as much 
as in that of Greece, to follow all too great exaltation 
of mortal prosperity. 

"I trust the public fortunes may be ransomed from 
reverse by my own bitter personal sorrow, inasmuch 
as my triumph has been preceded and followed by the 
deaths of my two sons. Perseus, though in his own capti- 
vity he saw his children led captive, still has them safe : I, 
who have triumphed in his defeat, came from the funeral 
of one son, in my chariot from the Capitol, to the death- 
bed of another ; and of my many children, there is none 
surviving to bear the name of ^milius Paulus." — (xlv. 41.) 

The unfortunate successor of Alexander the Great 
died in exile at Alba, and Macedonia finally became 
a Roman province. But at this point the Annals of 
Livy fail us — his remaining books have disaj)peared. 
Yet this accidental termination can scarcely be called 
abrupt; for Polybius dates from this battle of Pydna 
the full establishment of the universal empire of 
Kome. 



CHAPTER XIIL 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



It has been impossible, in the limits of this volume, 
to examine critically into the historical truth of 
the statements contained in these voluminous Annals. 
The keenest and most learned inquirers are by no 
means agreed in their estimate of Livy as a historical 
authority. Between the sweeping statement of 
Macaulay, that " no historian with whom we are ac- 
quainted has shown so complete an indifference to 
truth," and the chivalrous " Plea " put forth in his 
defence by Dr Dyer,* there is room for various de- 
grees of faith or scepticism. His leading purpose was 
undoubtedly first to celebrate the growth of his 
country^s glory, and secondly to charm by his narra- 
tive and dramatic powers the educated readers of the 
court of Augustus. If he sometimes disguised the 
truth for his purposes, it was rather an artistic than 
a moral dishonesty : it was the same kind of delin- 
quency as that of the painter who plants or cuts down 
his tree in the foreground, in order to improve the 
composition of his picture ; or who translates liberally 
on his canvas the homely features of his sitter. Livy 

* A Plea for Livy. 



184 Livr. 

wanted many qualifications which we should consider 
indispensable for a national historian. He wrote of 
war as a civilian, of constitutional history as a layman, 
of antiquities as a gossip ; and of many things which 
we look for in a comprehensive hi^^tory — of art, of 
literature, of domestic manners — he does not write at 
all. Of geography he seems to have known nothing, 
and his best defence is that he professes nothing. He 
ought to have had some acquaintance with the Alps, 
and might have at least settled for us the question 
of Hannibars route ; but he does not, and evidently 
does not care to do so. It is impossible to follow 
him in any account of a campaign. His only attempt 
at a geographical description, so far as we know, was, 
curiously enough, that of our own island : it was con- 
tained in a portion of his history now lost to us, and if 
we may judge from the vagueness of his other notices, 
the loss is no great matter. Gibbon half apologises for 
this defect in him as a military historian, by saying that 
he wrote as "a man of letters, covered with the dust 
of his library ; " but to imagine Livy as poring over 
old manuscripts and charters, and ransacking a hun- 
dred volumes (if he had them) to verify a date or an 
incident, would be a great mistake. He seems to have 
balanced, in some oflp-hand way, the varying statements 
of the half-dozen authors whom he consulted (possibly 
he had no more to consult), to have adopted, as he 
more than once almost confesses, that which seemed 
to him the most picturesque and best adapted for his 
purpose, and to have buUt up on it his own rich and 
fluent narrative. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 185 

Yet it is true that with, all this utter want of the 
critical and judicial faculties which go so far to make 
a great historian — and though he dealt with facts very 
much on the principle that, when they did not favour 
his purpose as the chronicler of the La'jional glory, it 
was *' so much the worse for the facts " — he has, to 
use M. Taine's words, "^ done more for Eoman history 
than all who have striven to reconstruct him. The 
impression he has left on us of the grandeur of Eome, 
and the steps by which she reached it, is the true one. 
The charm of his narrative is not spoilt — it even 
sometimes gaius in interest — by his intensely Eoman 
feeling. Our own national spirit goes a long way to 
excuse him when he ascribes to Carthaginians, to 
Greeks, to Asiatics, "perfidy," and boastfulness, and 
falsehood, as though they were vices abhorrent to 
Eoman nature : if they were not unknown in Eomans 
as they were, at least he repudiates them for Eomans 
as they should be. Much has been said as to his in- 
justice to the character of Hannibal. Eut, in the first 
place, he is not nearly so unjust to him as were the 
national jDoets of Eome ; and in their case and in his, 
wide allowance must be made for the light in which 
the patriot poet or chronicler looks upon the invader 
of his country. Xut to introduce any modern in- 
stances, — are we much surprised that tlie Jesuits in 
Spain should have painted Sir Francis Drake as half 
man and half devil, and the rest of the English nation 
as little better than fiends ? And do we remember 
how our own writers of the day slandered and cari- 
* Essai siir Tite Live, p. 179. 



186 Livr, 

catured tlie great ^N'apoleonl But, after all, the im- 
pression which we gain of Hannibal from the pages of 
Livy is that he was beyond comparison the greatest 
general of his age ; counterpoising in his own person, 
if not outweighing, the various abilities of the suc- 
cessive commanders — some of them remarkable men 
— whom Eome sent into the field against him. Con- 
sciously or unconsciously, — whether his admiration 
for the man overcame his national prejudice, or the 
instinct of the artist selected that grand figure for his 
model, — he has made the mighty Carthaginian the 
hero of his tale. 

For an artist Livy is, when all has been said, far 
more than a historian. The word historian means, in 
its very derivation, a patient inquirer into facts and 
circumstances j and that Livy was not. It was the 
powers of the poet, the novelist, the dramatist, which 
he possessed in such large measure, and these have 
given to his pages a lasting interest, undiminished 
even when his story is no longer accepted in all cases 
as trustworthy. Above all, he carries his readers with 
him by his great gift of oratory — the gift which per- 
haps the Eomans, like the Athenians, in their pride of 
civilisation, valued beyond all others, and which has 
by no means lost its position amongst ourselves. 



END OF LlVir. 






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